Kafka’s Ape Meets the Natyashastra

Abstract

To the Academy is a multi-media performance work that makes poignant and humorous commentary about education, common paradigms of diversity, and the oppressive nature of institutional labor. Created through a dialogue between myself, an Indian American with training in various forms of physical theatre and Indian dance, and Guyanese-Canadian actor Marc Gomes, it has been performed at several universities and arts centers since 2015. In this essay, I will interrogate the ways in which we place select elements of “Indian tradition” at the service of the piece’s overarching theme of histories of European domination, asking whether making these cultural materials subservient to our political agenda constitutes a form of appropriation. I examine three components of the work: the character of the classical Indian dancer who appears in the first section of the show, the explicit references to the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, the Natyashastra, and the framing of both these elements within our adaptation of Franz Kafka’s story, “Report to an Academy,” about an ape who learns to impersonate humans. In so doing, I explore the ethical responsibilities artists of color have in working with intercultural aesthetics. Furthermore, I assert the inevitably ambivalent nature of activist performance, even if artists aim to resist hegemonic structures.

1. Introduction

To the Academy is a multi-media performance work that makes poignant and humorous commentary about education, common paradigms of diversity, and the oppressive nature of institutional labor. It has been performed at several universities and arts centers since its inception in 2015, making its way through various versions adapted to the social and spatial dynamics of any given performance context. Beyond its periodic culmination in front of audiences, the work constitutes an ongoing process of exploration in collaborative art making between two performers with divergent backgrounds. I am an Indian American dancer trained in various forms of dance, including Bharatanatyam, officially designated as one of the “classical” forms of Indian dance. I also have experience with psycho-physical acting methods, including techniques drawn from Jerzy Grotowski, Jacques Lecoq, and Richard Schechner. Much of my time has been spent living and participating in experimental performance making collectives in Ecuador and Cuba. My collaborator, Marc Gomes, hails from Guyana, was trained in a conservatory, performed on stage in Canada, and then spent decades on American television. We are both motivated by existential questions about the nature of theatre and acting. We are also both educators in a state of discomfort about arts training in the United States—a commonality that was the original catalyst for our working together.

To the Academy has high stakes for us as professionals and people since it is a means of surviving the deep compromises into which we have had to enter. We make our living in places in which our presence as “people of color” (the term often used in referring to us, without asking whether this is a preferred identity marker) is commoditized to suit our employers’ stated agendas for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” At the same time, academic hierarchies render us unable to comment on the ways in which we are meant to stand as evidence of the achievement of diversity goals, nor do they permit us to initiate reflection about how such goals are defined. In making and performing To the Academy, we have enacted a space of freedom in which to sharpen our observation of the worlds we move through, articulate our experience to others, and laugh at all of it—including at ourselves.

This essay is an extension of my experience of the piece; it is a place in which to reflect on the performance’s making and reception and to illuminate the problematics it raises through academic analysis. Scholarly rumination enables me to tie To the Academy to lively discussions about the politics of Indian tradition and locate myself within a trajectory of intercultural theatre. However, this mode of understanding entails a movement towards abstraction and simplification and does not allow for the emotional and visceral experience that live performance creates for performers and audience. Furthermore, the solitary act of reading does not mirror the kinesthetic dialogue that takes place in the collective experience of spectatorship. Something is gained, something is lost.

That said, the essay is also an obligation. As an artist-scholar, I am compelled by dominant, academic perspectives on what constitutes legitimate productivity to translate my artistic pursuits into this mode of real “research.” Institutions and disciplines might not otherwise see performance and activism as measurable outcomes that can situate me in a professional hierarchy.

Artistic and political questions have propelled the process of making To the Academy at every turn. In what follows, I will interrogate one evolving aspect of our project, namely the ways in which we place select elements of “Indian tradition” at the service of the piece’s overarching theme of histories of European domination. Throughout the work, we present elements drawn from Indian performance forms, just as in our rehearsal we have sought inspiration from underlying principles of Indian performance in establishing the relationship between performer and audience and connections between text, movement, and spectacle. These cultural artifacts and knowledge systems find their way into the piece since they form part of my training and life experience. However, their presence is meant to support a broader social message, as well as serve as raw material for artistic experimentation. This sets up a conundrum. As a South Asian American artist, I wonder whether making these cultural materials subservient to our political agenda might constitute a form of appropriation. Moreover, our audiences are largely unfamiliar with Indian performance and what we perform might be seen as authoritative. What is our ethical responsibility of representation in this context, especially since the techniques and strategies we adopt hail from a cultural geography where diversity exceeds ready representation and where performance forms are enmeshed within histories of caste exclusion and virulent versions of nationalism?

At the same time, To the Academy works towards making palpable the ongoing legacies of Orientalism and Western domination. Its aim is to support efforts to decolonize institutions in the United States and expose the ways in which our techno-surveillance culture oppresses all kinds of people. We see ourselves as instigators of needed conversations around what a true inclusivity might look like and how we might move towards it. Thus, we ask ourselves whether our progressive aims for To the Academy justify the presence of the Indian cultural materials in ways that are expansive and liberatory, rather than reductive or jingoistic.

To explore these questions, I will begin by outlining the history of To the Academy’s development, beginning with the circumstances that prompted it, the reaction of audiences, and our current artistic goals. From here I will move towards examining three key components of the work, namely the character of the classical Indian dancer who appears in the first section of the show, the explicit references to the ancient and problematic Sanskrit treatise on performance, the Natyashastra, and the framing of both these elements within our adaptation of Kafka’s story about an ape who learns to impersonate humans. It is not my intention to sidestep the political pitfalls of this kind of “intercultural” work. On the contrary, I seek to excavate the contextual nature of truths advanced by activist performance. Since Judith Butler (1990) articulated the potential of the body to subvert hegemonic expectations of gender identity, academic literature has embraced performance’s potential for enacting agency (Banerji 2010; Dolan 2005; Dutt and Sarkar Munsi 2010; Gere 2001; Gottschild 1996; Hall 2000; Kowal 2010; McKenzie 2001; Muñoz 1999; Parker and Sedgwick 1995; Rose 1994; Taylor 2001). However, several scholars across various disciplines have concomitantly pointed out that political resistance is an ambivalent enterprise, often affirming the very concepts, languages, and inequitable social relations it seeks to contest (Abu-Lughod 1990; Brown 1996; Gledhill 2012; Hollander and Einwohner 2004; Kliger 1996; Ortner 1995; Roseberry 1994; Scott 1990; Seymour 2006; Sholette 2017; Petrović 2018). As I will argue here, To the Academy exemplifies this deep contradiction within its own discursive field. The piece simultaneously constitutes an intervention into academic power structures and discourse even as the piece—and its artists—benefit from and accrue relevance precisely because of the ongoing fixity of those very structures and discourses.

2. The Work’s Inception

In 2015, Marc and I entered a large, public teaching university. I was a tenure-track faculty member and Marc was a graduate student returning to study after decades of professional work. Within a short period of time, it became readily apparent that I would be charged primarily with large, foundational, and general ed courses while other white faculty members taught small classes within their areas of expertise. Marc, on the other hand, was under the tutelage of those same faculty members who exerted considerable power over what was to be studied and how, just as they were not conscious of the ways in which both their pedagogy and materials represented and actively promoted a Euro-American focus. Culturally and historically contingent truths with respect to the purpose of theatre, its process, and aesthetics were continuously put forth as universal and superior.

To the Academy came about when I was requested to participate at a fundraising gala by giving a “TED Talk-like” lecture about my scholarship. The event itself was a sad one, testimony to the grave state of a department tasked with meeting the needs of its students, many of whom were the first member of their families to attend college, but without sufficient resources to carry out the day-to-day work. At the same time, the request troubled me. Given my positioning within the department, I wondered about the ethics of asking me to represent it in front of a group of donors by speaking about my exotic area of expertise—namely the performance practices of India. My teaching duties did not allow for me to teach much about India, since this body of knowledge was structurally construed as peripheral in the curriculum. Furthermore, given the ethnic and racial demographic of the faculty and staff, I was aware (and in fact had even been told at one point) that I was a “diversity hire.” I realized that my lecture would make the department look inclusive of multiple perspectives and backgrounds and that I would function as a visual signifier of diversity. Of course, there was also the fact that the TED Talk itself is a problematic model, with its emphasis on inspiration to the exclusion of criticality.

As a tenure-track faculty member with little agency to reject the request, I accepted it. I then set about brainstorming ways I could honor the task while resisting the premises on which it had been put forth. Jumping out of the TED Talk frame, I imagined a scenario in which a lecture might start, beguiling an audience into thinking they were listening to an earnest scholar, only to witness it unravel before their eyes and become a theatrical event that would poke fun at their expectations. More than be a talk about Indian theatre, the staging of the piece would draw from underlying principles of Indian performance to integrate verbal text, gesture, danced movement, and costume elements. I sat at my desk one day and wrote a lecture that both declared and obfuscated truths, and posited critical questions while arriving at no answers. As I wrote, I realized that I needed a collaborator. Knowing Marc had an interest in a wide range of performance practices, as well as a critical eye on institutional politics, I asked him to join me.

We began working together in the studio in psycho-physical exercises of improvisation drawn from Viewpoints1, Jerzy Grotowski2, and things we made up as we went along. Now with two performers, one male and one female identified, there was the chance to highlight the sexual as well as cultural and racial politics of the academy. We envisioned Marc in the role of a bombastic scholar, bedazzled by his mastery over non-Western forms of knowledge, and me as the embodied practitioner of that knowledge. Over the course of the lecture, the scholar’s unassailable position began to disintegrate as the practitioner, at first confined to the role of demonstrator, gained the upper hand by tricking the scholar into revealing the limits of his knowledge. In the end, she gained the upper hand and took over the lecture, while the humiliated scholar retreated into the audience and clownishly fell asleep. Scenic elements were kept simple to suit the studio space in which we were to perform: a podium, a whiteboard, and a theatrical box. Marc wore a suit. I wore a black dress made of layers of crumpled silk and elaborate makeup that outlined my eyes in black and gold (Figure 1). Although this was not traditional costuming, our intention was that it play with the audience’s lack of familiarity with “real” Indian practices.

The performance was well attended. The audience entered easily into the premise of a lecture at the top of the show and was gleefully surprised in realizing that something else was going on. Some laughed at the tug-of-war between the characters and others later expressed finding the movement beautiful. Some admired the “Indian” costume. Only a few—mostly grad students—remarked finding the work provocative.

3. The Work’s Development

The audience response led us to realize that we had a prototype that could be developed. Keeping the basic structure, we refined sections, clarifying especially the relationship between the two apes. This involved integrating techniques of psychological realism more than before.

The following year in 2016, we performed the piece while on a residency at the Brown-RISD Summer Performance Lab. The audience of art students and faculty responded with laughter. One person joked that they wished we could do the piece at their next faculty meeting. Months later we performed at UCLA on invitation from a faculty friend in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. It was a different crowd this time around. The audience was composed mostly of women with rigorous training in critical theory and relatively little contact with theatrical practice. At a conversation conducted after the performance, many expressed enjoying seeing postcolonial theory enacted. There was also skepticism. Some felt that the embattled moments between the bombastic scholar and the lecturer read as violent. The comment surprised us as we had assumed these sections read as humorous. Moreover, as actors exercising consensual technique, we both felt safe. Another point of skepticism revolved around poking fun at academic language. A couple people in the room were deeply committed to their scholarly practice and felt that the piece encouraged an anti-intellectualism that invalidates critical knowledge production.3 We began to realize that the piece created moments of alienation and caused people to ask questions.

At UCLA, we also received what would become an invaluable reference. Someone asked whether we knew Kafka’s short story, “A Report to an Academy” about an ape, Red Peter, who addresses a group of scientists. The serendipitous parallels between the title of the story and the title of our piece, as well as the thematic similarities, suggested a new avenue of exploration.

We dove into the short story. The ape’s perceptive comments to his audience of scientists suggested images of hallowed lecture halls of the late 19th century. His clever training of himself to become a music hall performer in order to escape life in the zoological garden mirrored our own experience of performing versions of ourselves that earned us the status of good citizens in our work worlds. One of the first surprises in the story was that Red Peter, who speaks in the first person throughout, mentions having been provided by his handlers with a girl ape, specifically a chimpanzee who he sees as inferior in her relative lack of civility. We began to experiment with ways that we could modify this to suit our own dramaturgical ends by thinking about ourselves as an ape couple rehearsing a show for scholars at a conference. Although our ape exhibited male privilege at various moments, he was hardly superior to his consort, who easily gained the upper hand when she chose. This in turn opened possibilities for humor inspired by classic 1950s American televised couples such as Lucy and Ricky of the famed I Love Lucy. The sitcom, as a performance form, became suddenly relevant. Although not typically associated with political commentary, we hoped that the form’s ubiquity would draw audiences into the piece more deeply (Figure 2).

Over the next few years, we worked off and on, taking each performance as an opportunity to solicit feedback. We started building a stronger narrative through-line that created questions in the audience’s mind about who they were seeing on stage. In starting to work more with apeness, we knew we were asking spectators to engage with the history of white supremacy’s dehumanizing of racialized Others, as I will discuss later in this essay. The apes also allowed us to push against anthrocentrism and human exceptionalism, asking questions about the imaginative capacities of other species. Since the apes were rehearsing, and therefore in a moment of relative private, it meant that we could depict their behind-the-scenes interactions as well as the great efforts they made to achieve the virtuosic impersonation of humans that they did in their variety act.

In spring of 2019, after a performance at UC Berkeley, we took the decision to take the piece to its next level. We anticipated a period of rigorous dramaturgical analysis, work with a director, and the input of design collaborators. However, this went by the wayside as the COVID pandemic descended in 2020. The piece went into a two-year period of hibernation.

Our aspirations stirred again in 2022. An invitation came to perform To the Academy for students at the Clark Institute-Williams College MA in Art History and an invited audience from the broader community. It was an ideal opportunity to test drive a new version. Now thinking more ambitiously, we invited a team of collaborators: dramaturg Amy Holzapfel, director Kym Moore, creative producer Ann Marie Dorr, composer/sound designer Michael Costagliola, scenic designer Jason Simms, and projection designer, Wlad Woyno. Our spring workshop became the kick-off for a summer spent rehearsing in both India at the Adishakti Laboratory for Performing Arts Research and at Williams College.

The piece elicited strong responses from the 80 people who saw it in October 2023 over the course of two showings. With the fantastic feedback we received from friends, students, colleagues, directors of arts organizations, and producers, we decided it was time to create something that could speak to a broader audience. It is at this juncture that we start to revisit the questions that have intrigued us from the outset of our work, this time in awareness of the increased accountability that will come as part of communicating with a broader public. With this in mind, I turn my attention here towards the role of Indian cultural materials in the work.

4. The Indian Dancer

Indian dance makes an appearance in To the Academy through the theatrical character of a Bharatanatyam dancer, who engages in sporadic postures, mudras, and steps woven into dialogue, rather than gives a dance performance per se. At the top of this scene, a man at a podium organizes notes and writes talking points about the Natyashastra on a white board. To his right a woman in a Bharatanatyam costume sits waiting (Figure 3).

The bright color of the silk, the ornate jewelry pieces, as well as the incongruity with the man make the figure a spectacle (Figure 3). At the same time, her posture, that alternates between disinterested and looking out pointedly at the audience, contrasts sharply with the smiling, presentational mode in which one typically sees a Bharatanatyam dancer on stage (Bharucha 1995; Bose 1991, 1995, 2001; Chandralekha 1984; Chettur 2014, 2016; Mitra 2006; Vatsyayan 1967). As argued by Priya Srinivasan, Bharatanatyam constitutes a complex form of transnational labor that involves people engaged in multiple, highly specialized tasks. “In the aesthetic realm, audiences are trained not to see the labor of dance, but they are still consumers of that effort” (Srinivasan 2011, p. 12). At the top of To the Academy the dancer is present on stage, moving in and out of an interior focus, and with no attempt to represent anything in the spectator’s visual field.4 It is akin to the demeanor one can see in seasoned performers waiting in the wings or on the sidelines before entering the stage. Entering into this neutral presence is an integral part of the dancer’s process. Yet it is deemed inappropriate for today’s audiences to see, given that Bharatanatyam stagecraft borrows from the Western modern convention of making the backstage invisible. Portraying the dancer in this moment of pre-communication is a strategy of creating what artist-scholar Ananya Chatterjea identifies as a “visibility-resistant-to-objectification” (Chatterjea 2004, p. 23).

The man, strong and authoritative, begins to speak, but within moments what he says veers just slightly off the script for a typical lecture. He becomes increasingly bombastic, relying on the poesis, tensions, and rhythm that academic language offers as he articulates pronouncements about the relationship between art and neoliberalism, the status of postcolonial scholars, and the framing of non-Western cultures as folkloric. Throughout his grand and at times obtuse statements, accompanied by equally cryptic PowerPoint images (designed in conversation with an AI platform), the dancer is overshadowed by the man’s presence as he walks around the stage and directly addresses the audience. In his adamant assertions about topics of uncertain connection to her function, one wonders why she might be sitting there at all. After several minutes the man asks the audience, “What might be a salient and unruly object for our attention at this juncture?” He proceeds to tell them that it will be contemporary Indian performance.

Shortly after this the lecture takes a precipitous turn as the man forgets what he wants to say and the dancer springs out of the chair and offers to clarify. Her intervention challenges the man who endeavors to sideline and dominate her, seeking to remind her in various ways that she is the object of inquiry. Eventually, the dancer converts the man into a subservient narrator as she executes a brief demonstration of the dance, and banishes the man from centerstage. After protesting, he clownishly falls asleep as she finishes the lecture. This narrative of vindication hinges on establishing and then inverting Orientalist tropes about the submissive Asian woman (Hernández 2020; Kondo 1990; Lawrence 2021). Moreover, we draw from the bank of a historical imaginary that regards the female performer as readily available for the male gaze (Burt 2003; Coorlawala 1996; Daly 1991; Mulvey 1975; Sarkar Munsi 2017) and as a body whose voice is to be carefully managed (Putcha 2023). When the dancer gains the upper hand, she becomes the protagonist.

The set-up also seeks to call attention to associations with specifically Indian dance, even when several years of dance studies scholarship have addressed the imperial histories of the control of and fantasies about performance in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Reductive images of the bejeweled dancer were stock features in the Orientalist archive of photography and painting that represented the “exotic” Middle East and Asia (Allen 1997; Behdad 2016; Dox 2006; Hawthorn 2019; Imada 2011; Maira 2008; Min 2018; Ness 2008; Nochlin 1989; Said 1994; Shay and Sellers-Young 2003; Srinivasan 2009; van Nieuwkerk 2001; Warren 2006; Wood and Shay 1976; Young 2008).5 Such representations, as well as brokered forms of contact in compromised contexts such as World Fairs, provoked seminal reflections on the nature of performance and catalyzed innovations that took place in the early 20th century on the part of thinkers such as Antonin Artaud and performers such as Ruth St Denis (Coorlawala 1992; Desmond 1991; Kowal 2020; Savarese and Fowler 2001; Shawn et al. 1920). As Lionel Popkin asserts, the appropriation of Indian dance forms, that included passing off invented versions as authentic, are at the heart of the birth of modern dance (Popkin 2021). The connotations of Indian dance with the spectacle of Otherness remain present in the contemporary public sphere, one notable example being Madonna’s controversial incorporation of two Odissi dancers and projections of Hindu goddesses into her MTV Music Awards show in 1998 (Chakravorty 2000). More recent examples include Australian white rapper Iggy Azaela’s 2013 music video “Bounce” and Coldplay and Beyonce’s video for the 2015 hit, “Hymn for the Weekend” (Chung 2017).

Although these co-optations of the dancer into the canon of Western exotification are to be critiqued as such, setting the record straight cannot rest on simplistic notions of what South Asian dance is, either in formal or significatory terms. For example, Hindu American communities may rightfully argue about unauthorized appropriation and disrespect on the part of media artists such as Madonna, but they cannot legitimately assert that dances (or religious imagery, for that matter) have singular meanings in their country of origin. In India, the dancer has also been made into an icon in various historical periods whose symbolism overshadows the dance’s materiality and aesthetics, as well as subjugates traditional performers. After colonial law branded various performance practices as illegal, dance became a privileged site for nationalists to invent a version of culture that was “pure, distinctive, and unaltered by colonial hybridity” (O’Shea 2008, p. 169). Newly born cultural institutions furthered this agenda in the post-Independence period by conferring an official “classical” status on particular forms that granted access to government support (Banerji 2019). Common across efforts to “revive” dance at the service of creating a “legitimate” national culture was the upper caste appropriation of the intellectual property of hereditary communities of performers and the concomitant marginalization of those very communities (Meduri 2008; Soneji 2011). This erasure played out both in live performance as well as in film.6

In contemporary times, an elite version of dance continues to be synonymous with the nation. Posters of dancers decorate the walls of airport arrival halls in India and feature prominently in tourist promotions (Geary 2013; O’Shea 2016). Dancers are invited guests at government observances, and several have been identified by cultural observers as supporters of the religious nationalist agenda of the current ruling party, the BJP (Banerji 2022; The Print 2018). In all these contexts, the dancer is sublimated to their function as a living representation of nationhood. As observed by Banerji and Distante (2009),

The body of the Indian classical dancer is always an emblem and a problem. As an emblem, it signifies the wonders of an Indian cultural heritage. And as a problem, it signifies the wonders of an Indian cultural heritage. Inescapably, the dancing body reveals that its gift and promise is also its ballast and burden.

(Banerji and Distante 2009, p. 35)

The fact that a public debate about caste exclusion in the dance world has been kickstarted only very recently—largely due to hereditary practitioner Nritya Pillai’s cogent interventions into the performance arena and on digital platforms—is proof of the fact that dance continues to be disputed territory as well as a site for irreconcilable visions of the nation and citizenship (Johar 2016; Kedhar 2020; Morcom 2013; O’Shea 2007; Pillai 2020, 2022; Soneji 2011; UCLA Center for India and South Asia 2021; UCR Department of Dance 2022).

Thus, the dancer character in To the Academy carries a complex constellation of associations that vastly exceed the narrative’s “given circumstances.” The audiences for our work, however, are for the most part unfamiliar with Indian dance history. Although their reading of the dancer as a theatrical device for illustrating the history of Western imperialism as it incarnates across knowledge production and the gendered hierarchies of the academy may align with our agenda as artists, we are aware that spectators may concurrently superimpose uninformed notions about the dance’s culturally specific practice and significance. Informed by popular American discourses about the respectful honoring of the traditions of postcolonial Others, they may see the Indian dancer through the prism of “authenticity^”—a mode of interpretation that often attributes to images and practices readily identifiable source materials and singular meanings.7 They may grant me cultural ownership8 over the dance based on how I look, since US racial discourses rely on visual optics as a legitimizing mechanism for knowing the supposed truth of identity.9 This mode of truth making would inevitably fail to recognize that in India one’s credibility and politics operate at the intersection of other social determinations (caste, citizen/NRI, lineage of dance, religion, etc.). As theatre artists, we struggle with how to acknowledge all of this political and historical complexity without losing our audiences.

5. Referencing the Natyashastra

The Natyashastra is an ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance. Its origins are obscure. It is attributed to a mythical author, Sage Bharata, and there is no firm agreement about the number of chapters or meaning of verses. It appears to be a compilation from multiple sources the assembly of which dates to somewhere between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. What is certain is that from this period it inspired centuries of readers to inscribe their deep reflections in formal commentaries. As observed by Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock, “Although story-telling in drama or poetry is a universal human practice, few people have meditated as deeply and systematically on the questions it raises as thinkers in India, who over a period of 1500 years between the third and the eighteenth centuries, carried on an intense conversation about the emotional world of the story and its complex relationships to the world of the audience” (Pollock 2016, p. 1). In its comprehensive consideration of all aspects of stagecraft, covering everything from theatrical architecture, music, dance, costumes, makeup, gestures, emotions and more, the Natyashastra is one of the world’s most significant texts on theatrical practice.

From the top of our show, “Natyashastra” is displayed prominently on a whiteboard upstage center, thus functioning as both a scenic element and then referenced later in spoken dialogue. Underneath this titling are four numbered terms: vachika, aharya, sattvika abhinaya, and angika (Figure 4). The terminology, which refers to linguistic text, the visual language/spectacle of theatre, the portrayal of narrative description/inner emotional states, and dance/movement, is explained to the viewer when the dancer demonstrates the categories. Shortly after this, when she achieves her final win in the game to gain the upper hand over the bombastic male scholar, she impatiently interrupts her own lecturing to correct at the whiteboard the man’s misspelling of one of the terms, a moment that usually elicits laughter from the audience. She moves onwards to explain the relevance of traditional Indian performance forms for contemporary conceptualizations of the theatre, arguing that what is identified as ancient in the Indian context intersects with notions of postmodernity and queerness—an assertion that counters the idea that artistic innovation is exclusive to the West. Although the Natyashastra is not discussed again after the lecture scene, characters in later sections add details to the title on the whiteboard, such as underscoring and diacritics.

The treatise also reverberates in the ways in which we as performance makers tell our story through the orchestration of the four compositional elements stated on the whiteboard. Furthermore, throughout the piece we attempt to enact our claim that performance knowledge operates at the intersection of truth and pleasure—a claim we attribute explicitly to the Natyashastra at the end of the lecture.

As a teacher of multidisciplinary theatre making, I have never had any doubt that there is much in this ancient treatise for contemporary students to consider in understanding their own craft. Yet the Natyashastra only occasionally surfaces in dance departments and even less frequently in theatre training or studies. As some observers have noted, the performing arts in the US, both on stage and in educational contexts, have long been committed to Eurocentric systems of knowledge and white supremacist beliefs about the performing body (Chatterjea 2004; Davis 2018; DeFrantz and SLIPPAGE 2018; Fischer-Lichte et al. 2014; Foster 2009; Herrera 2017; Kerr-Berry 2012; Prichard 2019). In the aftermath of the uprisings after the brutal death of George Floyd in 2020, however, dance and theatre have been taken to task more forcefully by practitioners and scholars who have demanded examination of the racist underpinnings of training, the values of organizational work cultures, and narrative content.10 Arts venues and organizations have responded in various ways to the mandate to diversify, often promoting publicly their progress.11 Most recently, in 2023, after a year of anti-Asian hate crimes, media outlets celebrated what was billed as a grand victory, namely Asian actors’ receipt of Oscars, with the award for Supporting Actor going to Ke Huy Quan and Best Actress to Michelle Yeoh (one of only two actors of color to ever receive in this category), and the Indian film RRR winning in the best song category.12

With respect to scholarship, professional organizations have begun to address Euro-centrism, although BIPOC scholars began drawing attention long before this political moment to the ways in which dance and theatre studies prioritize white and elitist modes of art making.13 Between the two fields, dance has more actively engaged diverse perspectives. Dance education in many places has addressed questions of form and technique—with some training contexts even allowing auditioning with forms other than ballet and modern (Davis 2019; Mabingo 2019; Walker 2020). The discussion in theatre has circled largely around the issue of casting and the need to tell BIPOC stories. Form and realist acting techniques, offered in most schools, remain largely unquestioned.14

Given the wide-spread conservatism of theatre practice and study, teaching the Natyashastra constitutes an effort towards decolonizing curricula for multiple reasons. First, it pushes against standard theatre history that invariably locates the origins of drama exclusively in the Greek tradition as encapsulated by Aristotle’s Poetics. Secondly, the treatise’s location of movement practice on par with the delivery of text in the actor’s labor pushes against common notions about the primacy of the playwright and performance being about “doing a play.” Furthermore, the Natyashastra works against the firewalling of dance and theatre as exclusive disciplines, a hegemonic view that organizes most performing arts departments and funding. In light of what we know about how theatre is enacted, trained, and explained in the US, our integrating the treatise into the scenic design and dialogue of To the Academy aims to prompt a spectator to question the claims of universality that lurk below assumptions they may hold about the nature of theatre. In other words, we are attempting to make a political intervention.

Ironically, however, the Natyashastra is hardly a radical text. As described by dance historian Anurima Banerji, the treatise has come to occupy a “position of veneration and renown,” has a “formidable hold on Indian/diasporic artistic imaginaries and scholarship,” and is a “hegemonic object of contestation” (Banerji 2021, p. 132). In her meticulous tracing of the Natyashastra’s significance, Banerji identifies that the treatise’s authority over time has become one not of guideline but of singular law.15 Its influence is profound in our times as it is typically referenced as a legitimizing source text in standard dance training in both India and the diaspora, leading to what scholar Uttara Asha Coorlawala refers to as a “Sanskritized body” (Coorlawala 2004). However, the text’s reach extends beyond performance technique towards the construction of “an identitarian politics of difference on the grounds of gender and caste” (Banerji 2021, p. 133) in its prescriptions for how various characters are to be represented. The Natyashastra is thus an “elite repository” (p. 134) that affirms hegemonic ideals of personhood that are rarely brought under scrutiny in its commonplace uses. Performance scholars Urmimala Sarkar Munsi (2010) and Brahma Prakash (2019) concur that in the contemporary period the treatise continues to enact and naturalize a paradigm of inequitable social stratification.

I would extend the text’s dominant status to include its being written in Sanskrit. While not a spoken language, Sanskrit has occupied a privileged role in South Asian Studies in the West in its alliance with Classics and philology.16 In its status as a progenitor of the national language of Hindi, it is immersed within the bitter politics that have consistently asserted the superiority of the North Indian languages over the South Indian languages which belong to the Dravidian family, have their own ancient literature, and articulate different cultural ideals (Kandasamy 2022; Prasanna 2021). Moreover, as the language of upper-caste rituals performed by brahmin priests, Sanskrit is enmeshed within caste hierarchies, just as it has been claimed by the current ruling party’s nationalist assertions about Hinduism, making the government an agent of what sociologist M. N. Srinivas first identified as “Sanskritization” (Srinivas 1952), including by promoting the language in educational policy (Ansari 2021; Flåten 2019; Govindarajan 2016).

Without a doubt, the Natyashastra exercises inordinate power. None of its status as “law,” however, is interrogated in To the Academy. Performing the show in contexts informed by US identity politics, we rely on the treatise to represent the reluctance of educational institutions and academic disciplines to recognize non-Western forms of knowledge more generally. We narrow the treatise’s complicated semantic field to convert it into a tool for creating space for silenced voices. However, configuring the Natyashastra as evidence of the marginalization of South Asian (and by extension other) knowledge systems sits uneasily alongside assertions made by a privileged contingent of the Indian diasporic community that Hindus, as a minoritized community, are the targets of Hinduphobia in the US—a view that has been vociferously claimed in reactions to legislation against caste-based discrimination (Associated Press 2023; Iati 2022; The Hindu 2023). In our use of the Natyashastra, we do not seek to align with those who mobilize discourses of “victimization” while avoiding collaborating with BIPOC coalitions.17 Once again, we arrive as artists at a political conundrum, even as most of our audiences do not know about the connotations of the Natyashastra. Is the fact that the Natyashastra is not authoritative in the contexts in which we perform enough to sidestep its problematic associations?

6. Ape Impersonators and Intercultural Performance

To the Academy draws from multiple embodied and textual traditions and thereby enters into the category of “intercultural performance,” a genre that has inspired a wide body of scholarship. Much of the conversation has surrounded the ethical implications of what Daphne P. Lei has identified as “hegemonic intercultural theatre,” or HIT. HIT is a “specific artistic genre and state of mind that combines First World capital and brainpower with Third World raw material and labor, and Western classical texts with Eastern performance traditions” (Lei 2011, p. 571). It has roots in the appropriative work of early twentieth century European and American artists, who were inspired by exotic and nostalgic visions of the cultures of Asia. This impulse was also at the heart of celebrated works in the 1970s and 80s by Western practitioners such as Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Richard Schechner, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba, among others. During the lecture portion of To the Academy, we actually reference this history, listing the names of “Western theatre artists who have looked to India for inspiration.” Scholarly reception of the work of these artists has always been polarized. For example, on one hand Patrice Pavis praised the creativity realized through these forms of exchange and emphasized the mutual understanding that organized these processes (Pavis 1996). Sharply opposing this view was Rustom Bharucha, who criticized the ways in which intercultural works are developed in conditions of political and economic inequality and often affirm Orientalist frameworks for knowing the Other (Bharucha 1993).

In addressing the problematic history of HIT, scholars identify artists whose work responds to the legacy of HIT, such as choreographer Akram Khan who acknowledges non-white forms of spectatorship (Mitra 2015; Pillai 2017) and performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña who refuses the aesthetic and political logics of the Euro-American avant-garde (Gomez-Peña 1993). SanSan Kwan discusses dance artists who come together from different cultural backgrounds and artistic forms to create duets that posit relationality based upon the inclusive impulse of love (Kwan 2021). There is also ample literature about art and ritual from various locations in the Global South that produce non-Western modalities of interculturality (Balme 1999; Cabranes-Grant 2016; Tian 2008; Yong 2004).

We see our work in the spirit of what Ric Knowles calls “interculturalism from below” (Knowles 2010) to acknowledge collaboration between non-white, multi-disciplinary artists who do not conform to dominant theatrical conventions, commit themselves to horizontal exchange with other artists, and see performance as an effort to create and support communities. As an Asian American and Caribbean Canadian duo who draw from various orientations to the stage, our work defies ready definition. We move in and out of various styles of acting, drawing from Bharatanatyam, psychological realism, and Brecht, just as we have shaped sections of the work drawing from Jacques LeCoq, Jerzy Grotowski, and Veenapani Chawla. We embody characters, dance, and sing. We pass through multiple genres of performance, including the lecture, vaudeville, puppetry, the epic movie, British music hall, sitcom, and performance art. With respect to our artistic process, our design, directorial, production, and dramaturgical team is multiracial and multinational. We have done our best to forge a collaborative collective, rather than a hierarchical division of labor. Moreover, our performance engagements include community outreach programming. In conducting talk backs, visiting classes, and applying surveys, we have sought dialogue with our audiences about the difficult topics we address. We have reshaped the piece continuously based on their responses.

Part of our intercultural work has entailed engagement with the short story by the iconic German writer, Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Kafka is canonical as evidenced by his presence in literature courses, the volume of scholarly discussion about his contributions, and the translations of his works into several languages. On the other hand, Kafka’s status as a Jew, as well as his searing commentary on capitalist, industrial society, make him an outlier and socialist critic. “A Report for an Academy” is a highly theatrical text. The narration takes the form of the ape Red Peter’s monologue to a group of scientists in which he continuously references his strategies for imitating human beings, as well as his career as a music hall performer. It is no wonder that this story has been taken into the theatre, most recently with acclaimed adaptations such as Kafka’s Ape (2015), starring actor-producer Tony Bonani Miyambo of South Africa, and Kafka’s Monkey (2009), starring Katherine Hunter, at the Young Vic in London. While these two shows offer different treatments of the story, both make almost verbatim use of the entire text and emphasize virtuosic physical performances that vividly represent the ape’s straddling of the human and animal worlds. Our incorporation of “A Report for an Academy” into our work is much more in line with director Jerzy Grotowski’s ideas about “confronting” texts and the archetypes within, rather than seeking to mimetically reproduce them on stage—the common approach to text in realist theatre subsumed under the oft-declared phrase, “We are doing a play.” Our orientation to the story was shaped in part by the fact that we discovered it after we had already completed a first version of our own piece.

To the Academy differs from the aforementioned adaptations in that Kafka’s story is only one of our source texts and we use it as both monologue and dialogue. Our ape is not named Red Peter. His name is Manuvascar. However, he has a puppet named Red Peter, who is his therapist. We convert the chimpanzee consort of the ape, whom he mentions without name in the story while underscoring his disdain for her animal nature, into his artistic partner, Sahn. We take the theatrical nature of the ape’s lecture in its original form a step further; our two collaborators, Manuvascar and Sahn, are rehearsing a variety show they will perform for the “esteemed gentlemen of the Academy” at an event commemorating the ape’s journey from the wild, to captivity, to famous music hall performer. The subtext we work with as actors is that the stakes are high, and the apes are literally singing for their supper (Figure 5). As indicated in the story, the music hall is their only means of staying out of the inevitable fate of being made to reside in the zoological garden. For this reason, their virtuosity is less about the acquisition of culture and more about the primal instinct of survival. Manuvascar and Sahn’s imitation of humans is so thorough that were it not for emotional moments of intense anger or fear—moments in which ape physiology and language temporarily resume—the audience might take them for humans. The cultivation of doubt in the audience about their identity runs throughout the piece and is confirmed spectacularly by a surprise ending.

In this way, we play with the notion that humanness is achieved through performance.18 We work against personhood as an essential, biological identity the evidence for which is tied to commonsense beliefs about its visual obviousness. Instead, we rely on the kinesthetic strategy of impersonation. As argued by Kamath and Lothspeich in the Introduction to their recent edited volume of case studies from South Asia, impersonation is not about duping an audience. On the contrary, it is a “performative category that often challenges fixed or a priori categories of identity. In other words, impersonation does not entail imitation of an original by a copy; rather impersonation implies an interrogation of the very dichotomy between “real” versus “copy” (Kamath and Lothspeich 2023, p. 2). As noted by these scholars, most of the previous academic work on impersonation has focused on gendered identities, and thus this collection of essays makes a strong contribution in considering the performance of historical and mythological figures, racial types, and spirits. We see our piece in conversation with the work of actors across multiple forms of performance in South Asia who routinely impersonate non-human species in ways that seek to construct before the audience the inner emotional life of these beings. That our apes are in turn impersonators of humans poignantly illustrates to our audiences that impersonation is an epistemological method without which we might never know ourselves and at the same time an ontological condition of humanness.19

Our apes are seasoned performers, used to being on the road, confident in their skills, and able to generate new material at the drop of a hat. The success of their show hinges precisely on the fact that they are imitating humans. Their act is not one that seeks to conceal its performative nature. Nevertheless, despite their talents, Manuvascar and Sahn live in a state of precarity, afraid of boring or otherwise letting down their audiences. A couple times during their rehearsal a cinematic projection suddenly appears on the screen upstage showing two humans in full-body gorilla suits running on a college campus, wrangling with one another, or peering into the camera lens (Figure 6). Manuvascar and Sahn are shocked by the appearance of the video, followed by rage, and then suspicion as to whether someone is sabotaging them. It is not that they fear being outed as imposters, but that someone might be mocking their theatrical skills with the images of two clumsy humans play-acting is if they were apes.

The apes, whether on screen or embodied by the live actors, are unsettling for spectators. Apes have been a common trope in the ugly history of racializing imagery. Associating specific communities with apes is at the heart of “a spectrum of behaviors ranging from the mere depiction of individuals or groups as non-human primates to actually believing that they are less than human” (Panaitiu 2020, p. 110). This act of dehumanization, known as simianization, bolsters the “psychological distancing that can justify lack of empathy or even violence, both symbolic and physical towards members of a group” (p. 111).20 In the US, Black people have been consistently demeaned as ape-like since the 19th century.21 This history is alive in the present. For example, President Barack Obama was frequently portrayed as an ape by White nationalists (Beam 2016; Capehart 2011). Some spectators have questioned whether the apes in To the Academy make the piece relevant strictly for White audiences, or whether it is even possible to recodify these images in ways that are disruptive of supremacy.

Other viewers have commented that the apes trouble anthropocentric worldviews that anoint humans as superior. Some scholars argue that both racist and anti-racist discourses are predicated on a rejection of the fundamental animality of human beings (Peterson 2013). Moreover, human exceptionalism, the belief that we are distinct from other species in the most significant of ways, is an ethos that justifies beliefs about the rights of people to make other species subservient to their own ends, on the one hand, as well as the conviction that human beings are both stewards of the environment and at the center of environmental crisis, on the other.22 Manuvascar and Sahn exercise far more agency than humans typically attribute to other animals. In the deftness with which they refuse to be objects of inquiry and mock their supposedly erudite audience, they beat humans at their own game. Moreover, the fact that as actors we move back and forth between characterizations of apes and of humans blurs the lines between the two animal species and suggests that we are not so distanced from our primate cousins as we like to think.

However, at a talk back in 2023, a historian posed a different question. She wondered why we confined our conceptualization of the primates to Western cultural interpretations and did not engage with the canon of South Asian ideas and images about these beings. Citing the deity Hanuman, as well as the proximity of humans and monkeys in urban life, she underscored that in the Indian context the monkey was held in deep respect, whether in acknowledgement of its quick and quixotic capacity to wreak havoc or its connotations of devotion, virtue, and wisdom.

This was a reminder of something we had not considered at all. We realized that our not engaging with the South Asian traditions could read ironically as a kind of whitewashing of the apes. At the same time, the apes in our story actually are wise; they pull the rug out from under their erudite audience. In fact, in our narrative, Manuvascar and Sahn decide to present the variety act for the scientists precisely because they realize that the academics would never be able to understand the ape experience, and that therefore the show needs to revolve around the scientists’ own world. The members of the academy are “esteemed,” but they really know nothing at all.23 However, through the theatre, they might just come to understand a little something about themselves. For Manuvascar and Sahn, their performance constitutes a “report,” a chronicle that can “expand knowledge.” Perhaps the bold and insightful Hanuman or the monkey-tricksters of the Jataka tales are already present in our piece. But is it necessary to make the connection explicit? Are we affirming an imperial history by presenting the apes solely in light of Kafka’s complex character? And in the context of current political discourse in the US, can the apes function in our piece in ways that are multivalent and that comment on histories of representation without affirming them?

7. Towards the Next Version

As we enter into our next workshop to advance towards what we hope will be the final version of To the Academy, we hold the questions about our responsibility as artists close to heart. We are aware of our privileges in making the work. Speaking from a diasporic location in an empire, we have superior access to resources and mobility than most artists in the Global South. And as tenure-track educators, we enjoy institutional support that most artists and teachers do not, even as we are simultaneously subject to forms of exploitation and silencing.

Yet knowing how to move forward is not easy. On the one hand, we have a story to tell, a story that we believe raises timely, important issues. At the same time, we bear ethical obligations to represent cultural materials in ways that acknowledge problematic histories and contested meanings. As artists of color, we are tasked with addressing these contradictions, although the challenges may not be readily evident to viewers of the piece. I am reminded of dance scholar Ananya Chatterjea’s observation,

“…the dancing body of color is most often a mute or passive body—either a vehicle of cultural preservation or a clean slate upon which un-theorized instincts play themselves out—which are then credited for the artwork. These are ideologies that characteristically diminish and invisibilize the creative and political labor of artists of color and the complex processes in which they engage in working out the conceptual framework for choreography.”

(Chatterjea 2004, p. 27)

There are no easy solutions to the ambivalent messages inherent in our work. The coordination of multiple narrative lines (sound, scenic, text, physical score, etc.) in live performance, as well as the multi-sensory nature of spectatorial attention, make the cognitive processing of information different from when reading an academic article or listening to a podcast. The theatre offers an unwieldy language for articulating an intellectual argument or analysis. On the other hand, it allows for affective responses more readily than scholarly writing. We do not want our work to be heavy handedly didactic, nor in the “preaching from the soapbox” model of agitprop theatre. Moreover, in seeking to build a performance piece that eventually can engage a broader audience than just students and faculty, we are mindful that while people come to the theatre to learn about social issues, they also come to be entertained. In the end, we do our best to address the questions our work raises, knowing that its message will always be contradictory, its insights only partial, and its humor enjoyed by some and lost on others.