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Feminist Exploration of Material Objects in Anuradha Kapur's Jeevit Ya Mrit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2020

INDU JAIN
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Abstract

This article focuses on the Indian feminist director Anuradha Kapur's unique approach to theatrical objects and practices as stimulating gendered behavior. Analysing her play Jeevit Ya Mrit (Alive or Dead), I show Kapur's deliberate emphasis on the surplus of material objects and the devising of props as related to the figuration of the women actors onstage wherein the attempt is to focus on the mise en scène rather than the character being portrayed. With a discerning and a percipient eye for detail and an assemblage of objects onstage, the paper will focus on how Kapur deals with the mediality of the event, the format in which it is structured for the performance and the effect on the audience.

Type
Dossier–Theatrical Vestiges: Material Remains and Theatre Historiography
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , October 2020 , pp. 332 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2020

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References

NOTES

1 Jain, Kirti, ‘Different Concerns, Striking Similarities’, Theatre India, 3 (May 2001), pp. 22–7Google Scholar, here p. 22.

2 Jain, Indu, ‘Feminist Process and Performance: Interventions in Anamika Haksar's Antaryatra’, Theatre Research International, 42, 3 (2018), pp. 333–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Lavender, Andy, Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 4.

5 Anuradha Kapur is an Indian theatre director and professor of drama. She taught at the National School of Drama (NSD) for over three decades and was director of the NSD for six years (2007–13).

6 Anuradha Kapur, personal interview, Delhi, 2017.

7 Ibid.

8 The pallu is the top part of the Indian traditional attire called a saree.

9 Carlson, Marvin, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 168Google Scholar.