Paper short abstract:

The presentation will focus on the connections between my use of ethno-mimesis, collaborative meaning-making, and other aspects of performance studies with the capabilities approach. This participatory praxis method of intimate sharing helps build a sense of community in creative art making.

Paper long abstract:

I will share my work with rural women outside of Kolkata, India, and will present an excerpt of a current project. In this presentation, I will focus on the connections between my use of ethno-mimesis, collaborative meaning-making, and other aspects of performance studies with the capabilities approach. Ethno-mimesis involves embodied practices (may be collective) like walking, talking, and eating that allow for reflection on the more-than-rational, a sensory meeting of the inner and outer worlds—for instance, what kinds of moments, sensibilities, and memories are produced or invoked by an incident, a time of the day, a smell, an object, the intensity of a place, and other elements available to the senses. This participatory praxis method of intimate sharing, of working together through narratives and differences helps build a sense of community in the process of creative art making.

My presentation will begin as an ongoing conversation between my long-time collaborator Rosalie and me, centring around our intercultural process of developing ‘Nothing Happens in Women’s Literature’ -a series of interconnected movement-theatre pieces that address intercultural interactions between women at the most intimate levels. In this discussion, I will share a set of emerging methods of intercultural dramaturgy co-created and co-articulated by Rosalie and me, hinged on our lived experiences, intergenerational memory, oral narratives, and our personal artistic practice.

In the process of developing our intercultural work, we embrace and accept the border as method, and surrender to the (sur)reality of transit/migration as a (dis)organizing principle of performance. The methods that we have developed may be used as principles to talk about lived experiences, coping mechanisms, affect and interiority. Though we do not ascribe a strictly feminist interpretation of these principles, they do validate gendered experiences particularly pertaining to women's experiences of borders. Our research seeks to delve into the interface between performance and social sciences to focus on the knowledge of the everyday that is activated through 'performativity ' of these experiences. It largely draws upon the method of ethno-mimesis which brings together ethnographic material , a sensuous way of understanding the world around and presenting them in a hybrid performative space. It prioritises the domain of the 'unsayable' as Adorno explains and thereby activates knowledge of the everyday. We have worked through this methodology with women in urban settings, with student communities as well as with community of rural women.

I will also mention the work of Disha - a group of rural women I am working with, who live in a far flung village in the Sundarbans (mangrove and riverine area). They are building resistance and are working towards development of women's education, prohibition of women's trafficking and modes of developing self-sustenance for women within their community. It might be helpful to their narratives and find ways of meaningful collaboration with this women's group if we bring principles of ethno-mimesis to interact with their social development project. I would like to present voices of Disha as part of this panel to focus on possibilities of finding interface between performance and social work.