/// I Promise The Bearer…
This solo performance takes us through the everyday journey of a female artist in India: Her dreams, desires, and struggles to be an artist in a rapidly changing social landscape. The show takes on the exotic stereotypes of India in the West playfully. But the lighthearted tone of “what it means to be an artist” in the complex and murky terrain of funding and “white money”, gives way to the show’s central question – is money the greatest object of fiction? Something for which we trade lives, bodies, loves? After the pandemic, the question of money will be reopened: What exactly is the promise of a person who owns the object of fiction? Through the show, the artist attempts to make and distribute money using two printmaking techniques – the lithograph and the woodcut. Could this tactile method of making fictional currency lead us to a more humane existence?
CONCEIVED, PERFORMED BY Anuja Ghosalkar WRITTEN BY Ashutosh Potdar & Anuja Ghosalkar PERFORMANCE DESIGN Rebecca Spurgeon VISUAL ARTIST Debanshu Bhaumik LIGHT DESIGN Vikrant Thakar COSTUME DESIGN Marvin D’souza LITHOGRAPHS & WOODCUTS Atelier Prati REHEARSAL ASSISTANCE Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
ANUJA GHOSALKAR “I have a complicated relationship with money – having worked as an arts funder making grants to artists, but today writing grant proposals and being rejected multiple times as an artist myself. At 40 I am an independent performance maker with no access to state funds. Because I do not practice Indian classical dance or folk theatre or sing traditional songs, my art is not Indian enough to receive state money. I am described as ‘westernized’ and at best doing ‘experimental’ work. And this kind of categorization can and often does give me access to ‘white’ or European money. And like all money, 'white money' comes with a set of moral dilemmas – how can I, as an Asian, Indian, heterosexual, upper-caste woman eat my way up the racial food chain? Can I use this money to subvert years of colonialism? Can racial money be used for radical work?”
ANUJA GHOSALKAR is the founder of Drama Queen, a documentary theater company in India. Her practice focuses on personal histories, archival absences and the blurring of hierarchies between the audience and the performer – to extend the idea of theatre to create audacious work. Iterations around form, process, modes of media, sites, technologies, and the reclaiming of narratives on gender and intimacy are critical to her performance-making and pedagogy. Her work has been programmed by the University of Oxford, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Forum Transregionale-ZMO, and the University of Frankfurt am Main. She also curated an international workshop series on documentary theatre with Gob Squad, Boris Nikitin and Rimini Protokoll. At Serendipity Arts Virtual 2020 she was co-curator of VR performances.
