Page 304 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Street Theatre in Maharashtra 279

Dal (a youth forum of the Socialist Party), Amar Shek (an activist of
the communist trade union movement in Bombay), not to mention a
number of other contemporary action groups active in India since the
1970s. But the fact is that people’s grassroots socio-cultural move-
ments often succeeded and still succeed each other in a discontinued
and erratic manner because of a lack of archives, historians, institutions
to keep them alive for several generations and material means to
maintain direct links among them. No wonder then similar forms are
seen being re-invented time and again.

Collective Shaping of the Play

The peasant women animators who staged and performed the drama
on deserted women had an initial experience of role-playing and
improvisation of sketches. They were conversant with these means as
support of their reflection, either in their own self-learning and training
groups or in the meetings that they used to organize for children and
other young people. Such role plays are often used to project events
or small problems and they are called ‘action’ (kruti in Marathi). This
‘action’ is spontaneous, sporadic and momentary. They thought that
their attempt of theatrical representation of the results of their analysis
would not be more demanding nor require a long-term effort. Naturally,
in the absence of further real experience, direct or indirect, of full
actual dramatic performance, formal (on stage) or informal, they had
no global visual perception of a full drama. They had attended popular
performances such as ‘Tamasha’ and ‘Bharud’, but these forms did not
provide them a model adequate to their needs of expression.
The first representations made them progressively realize that the
task they had set for themselves was of another nature and demanded
an effort on a different scale with regard to the time to be spent, the
reflection to be made and the training to be undergone. The enthusiasm
dropped. On the one hand, the VCDA insisted on a sustained effort to
improve the quality of the performance and to render the experiment
really effective and valid. On the other hand, their dramatic competence
was initially too poor to gain authority in front of the other animators
of the VCDA. Besides, they were highly apprehensive of the reactions
of the public and were hesitant, for example, to act in the square of
their own village.