In paying attention to the various dimensions of balance mentioned earlier in this exposition, I had not considered the question of time: the past, the present, and the future, and the representations of these times in IFF Kashmir. Thus, when one of the student spectators expressed the response above – that the events portrayed in IFF Kashmir were not exclusive to the 1990s but were still being experienced in Kashmir today – I came away thinking more complexly about the notion of temporality. I realised that I had naively assumed that our target audience of students would immediately recognise IFF Kashmir as speaking to a past of which they had no lived experience – that the students would see the piece as performing narratives from across the ‘victim’/‘perpetrator’ spectrum to the conflicts that had happened in the region. Meditating upon this particular student’s response therefore forced me to consider the blurry lines between the past and the present – that the ongoing nature of the conflicts in Kashmir implies there is no straightforward demarcation between what happened in the 1990s and the events that occur today. So, if the past and the present in Kashmir are interlinked through the similarity of the socio-political conditions that these temporal periods encompass, what is the underlying implication behind the student’s response? Could it be that the student was asking us why we were portraying events that were part of his reality, albeit not necessarily part of his lived experience, without giving him alternative realities to think about? This is to say, was this student asking us to more clearly demarcate, in IFF Kashmir, how the events of the 1990s manifest similarly or differently in the current moment? Or, was this student asking us to consider representations of the future in the performance; was he asking us why we had shown ‘what is’, instead of ‘what might be’? When further exploring this student’s concern with his peers in the spectator group, it emerged that the question of the future is what most preoccupied the young people. In seeing resonances between their own lived experiences of the current realities in Kashmir and the events that occurred in the 1990s, this particular audience seemed to be asking us about the future. What was IFF Kashmir saying about the future of the place and its people? Right now, not much.
While I am not inclined toward creating a performance that propagates solutions or tells young people to behave in a certain way to ‘solve’ the problems of Kashmir, I do find the question of ‘the future’ to be an interesting one. Ethically, I believe our decision to target IFF Kashmir to spectators without the lived experience of the 1990s was a sound strategy. For example, in past work with MKMZ and Cages, my co-creators and I had discovered that spectators with lived experience of the 1990s were more concerned with questions of blame; of who was ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the narratives that were shown, rather than looking at the aesthetic experience in a larger sense. It is perhaps inevitable then that IFF Kashmir was crafted with a primary focus on how blame was balanced between different parties involved in the conflicts. Changing our target audience revealed a new dimension: that while our piece had achieved certain kinds of balance in tackling questions around victimhood and perpetration through the use of fragmented narratives, affect, and a more specifically targeted spectator demographic, we now needed to consider the temporal zones that are represented in the piece. As I write this, I am preparing for my next trip to Kashmir in July 2016, when my collaborators and I intend to develop IFF Kashmir into a four-hour long experience (as a step toward the twenty-four-hour experience that is envisioned as the ultimate goal); it is this question of ‘time’ that guides my creative process. What is IFF Kashmir saying about the past? How are those representations balanced by narratives of events in Kashmir’s present? And, finally, how do these performances of the past and the present interweave into a nuanced performance of what lies ahead?
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Student spectator: Ma’am. I don’t think you should have shown us those things that you showed us in the play. I was up all night … I was so disturbed by the performance.
My colleague: But don’t you think young people like you need to know about Kashmir’s past?
Student spectator: But sir, this is not the past. These things that you are talking about, they are still happening in Kashmir. This is our present.
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