Chronicles from Kashmir

Chronicles from Kashmir
Author: Dinesh Nandita
Publisher:
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2020
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 9781800640191

"'What is happening in Kashmir?' Chronicles from Kashmir explores this question through a site-adaptive 24-hour theatrical performance. Developed between 2013 and 2018 by the Ensemble Kashmir Theatre Akademi and Nandita Dinesh, the play uses a durational, promenade format to immerse its audience within a multitude of perspectives on life in Kashmir. From a wedding celebration that is interrupted by curfew, to schoolboys divided by policing strategies, and soldiers struggling with a toxic mixture of boredom and trauma, Chronicles from Kashmir uses performance, installation and collaborative creation to grapple with Kashmir's conflicts through the lenses of outsiders, insiders, and everyone in between. Due to varying degrees of censorship and suppression, the play has not been performed live since 2017. This book is, therefore, an attempt to keep Chronicles from Kashmir alive by including filmed scenes, a script, contextual questions, a glossary, and illuminating introductions by Nandita Dinesh and EKTA founder Bhawani Bashir Yasir. A valuable Open Access resource for practitioners, educators and students of performance and conflict, this book is also stimulating reading for anybody who has asked, 'What is happening in Kashmir?' This playscript includes: Twenty filmed scenes of the play in performance ; A range of contextual questions to stimulate discussion on staging site-adaptive theatre in places of conflict ; A helpful glossary."--Publisher's website.

Chronicles from Kashmir: An Annotated, Multimedia Script

Chronicles from Kashmir: An Annotated, Multimedia Script
Author: Nandita Dinesh
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-09-14
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 180064020X

‘What is happening in Kashmir?’ Chronicles from Kashmir explores this question through a site-adaptive 24-hour theatrical performance. Developed between 2013 and 2018 by the Ensemble Kashmir Theatre Akademi and Nandita Dinesh, the play uses a durational, promenade format to immerse its audience within a multitude of perspectives on life in Kashmir. From a wedding celebration that is interrupted by curfew, to schoolboys divided by policing strategies, and soldiers struggling with a toxic mixture of boredom and trauma, Chronicles from Kashmir uses performance, installation and collaborative creation to grapple with Kashmir’s conflicts through the lenses of outsiders, insiders, and everyone in between. Due to varying degrees of censorship and suppression, the play has not been performed live since 2017. This book is, therefore, an attempt to keep Chronicles from Kashmir alive by including filmed scenes, a script, contextual questions, a glossary, and illuminating introductions by Nandita Dinesh and EKTA founder Bhawani Bashir Yasir. A valuable Open Access resource for practitioners, educators and students of performance and conflict, this book is also stimulating reading for anybody who has asked, ‘What is happening in Kashmir?’ This playscript includes: Twenty filmed scenes of the play in performance A range of contextual questions to stimulate discussion on staging site-adaptive theatre in places of conflict A helpful glossary

After the Miners’ Strike

After the Miners’ Strike
Author: Paul Farmer
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2023-09-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1800649150

In this rich memoir, the first of two volumes, Paul Farmer traces the story of A39, the Cornish political theatre group he co-founded and ran from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Farmer offers a unique insight into A39’s creation, operation, and artistic practice during a period of convulsive political and social change. The reader is plunged into the national miners’ strike and the collapse of Cornish tin mining, the impact of Thatcherism and ‘Reaganomics’, and the experience of touring Germany on the brink of reunification, alongside the influence on A39 of writers Bertolt Brecht, John McGrath and Keith Johnstone. Farmer, a former bus driver turned artistic director, details the theatre group’s inception and development as it fought to break down social barriers, attract audiences, and survive with little more than a beaten-up Renault 12, a photocopier and two second-hand stage lights at its disposal: the book traces the progress from these raw materials to the development of an integrated community theatre practice for Cornwall. Farmer’s candour and humour enliven this unique insight into 1980s theatre and politics. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in theatre history, life in Cornwall, and the relationship between performance and society during a turbulent era.

Writing in-Between

Writing in-Between
Author: Nandita Dinesh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2023-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003846203

Writing in-Between lies at intersections: between theory and praxis; between fiction and non-fiction; between author and reader; between the personal and the political. Beginning with a conceptual glossary that prepares readers for their journey through the book, Dinesh offers two central texts to invite readers to become co-creators. The first, F for _____, is written as an “academic novella” and culminates with an interactive section that is composed of guided invitations for the reader/co-creator. The second text, Julys, takes the form of a “dramatic memoir” and intersperses invitations for readers/co-creators between each of its chapters. Dinesh brings these threads together in an entirely interactive concluding chapter, where her hopes for collaborative meaning making take centre stage. In all of its unique invitations to engage, Dinesh’s readers/co-creators can either choose to craft their creations in personal notebooks or blank spaces in this work’s physical copy, or to engage more publicly via virtual forums that can be accessed via QR codes and accompanying links that are scattered throughout the book. Guided by questions about writing can “do” — questions that have shaped Dinesh’s work as an artist, scholar, and educator for almost two decades — Writing in Between embodies one central tenet: that the significance of performative writing might be most powerfully experienced through a collaborative process of meaning making between a text’s author and its readers turned co-creators.

Creative Writing and the Experiences of Others

Creative Writing and the Experiences of Others
Author: Nandita Dinesh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2024-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 104004123X

In times that are rife with complex manifestations of identity politics, writing classrooms across the world are hosting heated debates about what it means for authors to write about experiences outside their own. This book focuses on writing as the act of witnessing when the writers themselves were not present to witness in person. It seeks to answer the questions that come along with these experiences, such as what might it mean to write in order “to watch,” “to try and understand,” “to never look away,” and “to never forget” when the writer is an outsider to an experience? What might it mean to write about others in ways that do not essentialize or sensationalize, and in ways that are as humble, ethical, and responsible as possible? What might it mean to bear witness through the written word while engaged in a constant (re)negotiation with one’s own positioning i.e., to cultivate a condition of critical empathy that doesn’t also have the consequence of creative paralysis?

Chronicles from Kashmir

Chronicles from Kashmir
Author: Nandita Dinesh
Publisher: Bombaykala Books
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2018-07-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9788193835319

nformation for/from Outsiders: Chronicles from Kashmir has been in development since 2013, as a collaboration between Dr. Nandita Dinesh and the Ensemble Kashmir Theatre Akademi in Srinagar. Chronicles from Kashmir uses Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro's (1992) Information for Foreigners as its point of departure; it takes place in the promenade and is site-adaptive. Chronicles from Kashmir seeks to create a sense of "balance" between differently positioned voices that emerge when speaking about Kashmir; between differently placed narratives on the "victim"/"perpetrator" spectrum. While there is an inevitable streak of political commentary that runs throughout the work, a political current that cannot be escaped when talking about Kashmir - Chronicles from Kashmir does not espouse any one political ideology. We see ourselves as being artists and educators, using aesthetics and pedagogy to engage audiences with diverse perspectives from/about the Valley. Chronicles from Kashmir, like any other performance, has its limitations. It can never do justice to all the narratives that compose Kashmir. It's a step, though, a small step toward engaging audiences in stories and experiences that mainstream media might never share with them; a small step toward sparking more educated, and less polarized, opinions about what is happening in the region.

Theatre and War

Theatre and War
Author: Nandita Dinesh
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2016-07-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1783742615

Nandita Dinesh places Kipling’s "six honest serving-men" (who, what, when, where, why, how) in productive conversation with her own experiences in conflict zones across the world to offer a theoretical and practical reflection on making theatre in times of war. This timely and important book weaves together Dinesh’s personal narrative with the public story of modern conflict, illustrating as it does, the importance of theatre as a force for ethical deliberation and social justice. In it Dinesh asks how theatre might intervene in times and places of conflict and how we might reflect on such interventions. In pursuit of answers, Theatre and War adopts the methods of auto-ethnography, positioning the theatrical practitioner at the heart of conflict zones in northern Uganda, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Rwanda, Kenya, Nagaland, and Kashmir. No longer a detached observer, the researcher and practitioner has to be able to meld theory with practice; to speak to ‘doing’, without undervaluing the importance of ‘thinking about doing’. Each chapter approaches the need for a synthesis of theory and practice by way of a term of inquiry―Why, Where, Who, What, When―and each is equipped with a set of unflinchingly honest field notes that are designed to reveal some of the ‘hows’ from the author’s own repertoire: questions and issues that were encountered during her own theatrical undertakings, along with first hand reflection on the complexities, potential, and challenges that attended her global work in community theatre. Within these notes are strategies that give the reader a practical insight into how the discussion might find its footing on the ground of war. The range and scope of this book make it required reading for those interested in theatre―practitioners, researchers, and students alike—as well as those seeking to understand the applications of the arts for ethics, politics, and education.

Shahnameh

Shahnameh
Author: Abolqasem Ferdowsi
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 1041
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1101993235

The definitive translation by Dick Davis of the great national epic of Iran—now newly revised and expanded to be the most complete English-language edition A Penguin Classic Dick Davis—“our pre-eminent translator from the Persian” (The Washington Post)—has revised and expanded his acclaimed translation of Ferdowsi’s masterpiece, adding more than 100 pages of newly translated text. Davis’s elegant combination of prose and verse allows the poetry of the Shahnameh to sing its own tales directly, interspersed sparingly with clearly marked explanations to ease along modern readers. Originally composed for the Samanid princes of Khorasan in the tenth century, the Shahnameh is among the greatest works of world literature. This prodigious narrative tells the story of pre-Islamic Persia, from the mythical creation of the world and the dawn of Persian civilization through the seventh-century Arab conquest. The stories of the Shahnameh are deeply embedded in Persian culture and beyond, as attested by their appearance in such works as The Kite Runner and the love poems of Rumi and Hafez. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Theatre & War

Theatre & War
Author: Nandita Dinesh
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2019-07-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 162273453X

In Theatre & War: Notes from the Field (2016, 2018), Dinesh writes about making theatre in zones of conflict. She analyzes practice; she describes various projects that she has undertaken ‘on the ground’; she theorizes strategies that might be useful to other practitioner-researchers who are involved in similar work. In this sequel of sorts, Dinesh chooses to return to the same themes: of theatre, of war. But this time, she intentionally crafts her notes from afar. From somewhere outside the field. From somewhere outside the practice. And yet, a somewhere that is consumed by the field. And the practice. Through writing that seeks to ‘do’, through writing that seeks to ‘perform’, Dinesh use different voices in this book. Voices that come from more traditional archival sources, which are then re-conceptualized as drama. Voices that come from sources that occupy the space between archived and lived experience, which are then shaped into creative vignettes. Voices that come from Dinesh’s repertoire – her own lived experiences – that are then crafted as flash fiction about past/ present/ future collaborators. By weaving together variously positioned experiences and voices through creative (re)interpretations, Theatre & War: Notes from Afar is a book that could be read; it is also a book that could be performed.