Workshopping IFF Kashmir
Once I had a draft of IFF Kashmir, the second stage involved workshopping the script with my co-creators when I visited in Kashmir in July 2015. During this process of workshopping, my colleagues played a central role in taking the work to the next stage: from helping me edit the use of language (the director of the company translated my English script into Urdu), to providing feedback on how my attempts to balance narratives might be differently interpreted by a Kashmiri audience, to reaching a collaborative decision that a piece such as IFF Kashmir, which was centred around violence during the 1990s, might best target an audience of young Kashmiris who had not lived through that decade themselves. This process of editing the script in a collaborative fashion was a powerful learning experience, which led me to realise that, despite my rigorous attempts to balance ‘victimhood’ and ‘perpetration’ in IFF Kashmir, there were contextual specificities that I had missed – specificities that I had not ‘seen’ through my lens as an inside-outsider/outside-insider to Kashmir. The process of workshopping the script therefore functioned as a process of collaborative writing in which the script that I had drafted by using experiences and material from Cages, MKMZ, and Gambaro’s work became a text that was shaped by a team of collaborative creators.
Let me give one example of this collaboration. The way I had drafted scene 5 of IFF Kashmir, the scene told a ‘simple’ story:
The audience enters a room that has two sections. One section is designed to look like a home and the other, a police station.
Two young children are playing in a house when policemen come looking for their father. The entire family is led to a police station where, after treating the parents and children with disdain, the chief of police asks the mother to take the children home. While the mother is settling her children at home, the policemen put a sack over the father’s head and take him out of the room. The mother eventually returns to the police station, looking for her husband. However, when she enters the station, she’s met with the response, ‘Husband? What husband?’
End of scene.
The commentary contained in this scene is quite obvious, of course: the enforced disappearances that have occurred and still occur in many parts of Kashmir. While I initially thought that the scene (which was one of the more direct renditions of a scene from Gambaro’s original) did a fairly accurate job of ‘balancing’ this particular narrative, there were three instances in which my colleagues’ feedback became instrumental in shaping its direction:
Instance #1: One of the actors in the piece came to me after rehearsal one day and said something like, ‘Look, there’s something missing in this scene. It’s too short, maybe? We don’t get to know any of the characters or understand the really dark undercurrents to disappearances. Can you add something to it?’ This colleague’s question had me up late that evening, attempting to understand how to add more dimensions to the scene. And it was then that I realised that what was/is tragic is not only that enforced disappearances occur in Kashmir but also that they happen time and time again to already affected families and communities. With this repetitive quality of suffering in mind, I rewrote scene 5 that night: instead of ending the scene with the father’s disappearance, the police show up to the same home the next day, looking for the mother. The same cycle of events recurs and the older brother is asked to take his younger sibling back to their home. While he is doing this, the policemen put a sack on the mother’s head and take her out of the room. When the older brother returns to the station to look for her he is met with the response, ‘Mother? What mother?’ The children return to their home and we rewind again. This time, the policemen come to take away the older brother; eventually, the youngest child is left alone at home. When the policemen come for him too, he ends the scene by repeating the line, ‘I am not here.’
Instance #2: The only female actress in the play said in reference to another scene, ‘why can’t we switch roles and make the perpetrator a woman?’ This actress’s suggestion made me question the strongly gendered ways in which I had (unconsciously) crafted the characterisation in IFF Kashmir. Partly due to patriarchal realities, and partly because the cast was almost all male, I realised that I had not given enough attention to the gender dynamics of the piece. So, in scene 5, where the allusion initially was that the father is or was a militant (hence the family being persecuted by the police), it was the mother that I eventually characterised as the militant who the police were seeking – a subtle yet political change that would not have come about without the intervention of this actress.
Instance #3: One or two days before our first performance, two actors came to me and said, ‘You know we just realised that you are only accusing the police [i.e., the Indian state machinery] in this scene. It’s not balanced. There are so many disappearances that take place in this scene. What about making one of them be caused by the Ikhwanis [i.e., the militants who are said to have ‘sold out’ to the Indian forces]? That way this scene will be more balanced.’ Late in the day, then, during one of our final rehearsals, we restaged a part of the scene to include a balance of culpability. The last repetition of the events in scene 5, where the men come for the youngest child, was rewritten so it did not involve the policemen. Instead, men wearing pherans (traditional Kashmiri tunics) and scarves around their faces come to take the boy away – the pheran and scarves are symbolic elements that any Kashmiri audience would interpret as being related to the Ikhwanis or militants.
While certainly not exhaustive, I hope that the abovementioned instances from the development of scene 5 will elucidate the kinds of collaborations that took place between my co-creators and myself: from general comments about a scene’s contents, to thoughts about characterisation, to specific critiques of balance within moments of the scene, my colleagues’ feedback was an integral part of how IFF Kashmir developed. After an intense period of collaborative reworking of the scenes I had by then drafted, IFF Kashmir took on the following shape:
In line with what we discussed as an ensemble after Cages and MKMZ – where spectators had very emotional responses to the content – IFF Kashmir was deemed to be best targeted toward an audience of high school students in Kashmir. As a result, our student audiences came from a high school in Srinagar that had an existing relationship with the theatre company and included young men and women who did not have a lived experience of the 1990s themselves. Furthermore, to augment the ethical and pedagogical dimensions for this target audience, IFF Kashmir experimented with an approach to ‘process-based spectatorship’: a strategy that involves spectators in a three-day process, which I had come to see the need for as a result of Cages and MKMZ. As part of this design, on the day preceding the performance itself, a colleague and I went to the school at which our spectators were students and used theatre exercises to introduce our spectators to the general idea of promenade theatre. While our reasons for implementing process-based spectatorship lie outside the scope of this article, it is important to highlight the time that we spent with IFF Kashmir’s student spectators. On the day following the workshop, the students came to a performance of IFF Kashmir; the day after the performance, a colleague and I went back to the school to solicit the students’ feedback on their experience of the performance. The student spectators’ experience of IFF Kashmir was therefore a three-day process: the first day introduced them to aesthetic elements they were unfamiliar with, which we did not want them to be overwhelmed by on the day of the performance; on the second day, the students attended IFF Kashmir; and the third day involved a session in which we asked the students for feedback on the performance. While the feedback session that occurred on the third day was partly a pedagogical tool, it was also a strategy that I insisted upon in order to aid the further development of IFF Kashmir.
My longer-term vision (at the moment) is for IFF Kashmir to manifest as a twenty-four hour immersive experience for audiences outside Kashmir. Before taking the performance outside Kashmir, however, I intend to develop the work in stages and, in so doing, extend the currently hour-long version of IFF Kashmir to a four-hour performance in 2016, an eight-to-twelve-hour experience in 2017, and a twenty-four-hour experience by 2020. Gathering feedback from different audiences is thus an important component of my research and artistic process, and it was on the third day of engaging with IFF Kashmir’s student spectators’ feedback that a new dimension to balance emerged: the question of time.
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