Debnath, Sandip. “Internal Workshop: The Third Theatre Methodology of Embodying Hunger.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 6, nos. 1–2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a129
In an impoverished [S]tate where millions of people are denied the basic necessities of life—food, water, electricity, accommodation, sanitation, fuel—the theatre cannot afford to be mere entertainment. […] If the theatre in Bengal failed to examine the predicament of the people, it would be redundant. (Bharucha xii–xiii)
Hunger has necessarily remained a leitmotif in the work of the Third Theatre. As a network of several ideologically and aesthetically aligned theatre groups, since its initiation in 1971 in Calcutta (Kolkata since 2001), Third Theatre has identified as a pro-people theatre movement that takes up issues of the people across India, especially in West Bengal. Over the last five decades, it has become a distinct and recognisable cultural force as a non-party Left free theatre movement, decisively off-proscenium,[1] that offers a distinct approach to representing the plight of the people, including conditions of hunger. In this essay, I draw on the work of the Third Theatre to show a counterpoint to Enzo Cozzi’s view on the performative impossibility of representing hunger except through a state of trance—“the spectated dance or performance of the empty stomach pulsating to be sated” (127). In the work of the Third Theatre, to represent hunger is not to enact (abhinay) but to react (anubhav) (Sircar, “Theatre-er” 44). Badal Sircar, the founder-director of the Third Theatre group Satabdi, introduces the phenomenon of hunger “practically, non-verbally” through the game of Mirroring, says Jo Trowsdale who experienced the process that enables the participants to “leap to another state of being” (Trowsdale 52). This process is called the Internal Workshop.
Drawing on personal interviews with Third Theatre practitioners, my experiences of being a participant-observer in three Third Theatre workshops, and similar records of experiences by practitioners of this theatre, I elaborate on the Internal Workshop process as the Third Theatre methodology of embodying and representing hunger. But, first, a look at its origins and development is needed for context.
The Third Theatre evolved as an exploratory theatre practice. Sircar received the two-year Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship from June 1971 to May 1973. The title of his proposed project was “Workshop for a Theatre of Synthesis as a Rural-Urban Link.” Sircar states, “I wanted this group [Satabdi] to be the nucleus of a workshop that would endeavour to develop the theatre of synthesis I was thinking about” (Sircar, “On Theatre” 3). We find that the transition from the director-formulated rehearsal method to the workshop-based trial-and-error rehearsal model had the initial sparks during his visit to Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia under the Cultural Exchange Programme of the Government of India for eight weeks from 17 April 1969 (Sircar “Purono”). He visited the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, then under the direction of Yuri Lyubimov. It was soon followed by his reading of Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre, watching a production, and a subsequent informal conversation with Grotowski at a restaurant in Wrotslav, Poland.
In 1971, Richard Schechner and Joan MacIntosh saw Satabdi’s proscenium performance of Sagina Mahato in Calcutta and went to meet Sircar after the performance.[2] Sircar had already heard of Schechner’s work off the proscenium and expressed his interest to learn more about the process. “I heard that Schechner never worked in the proscenium; to me, that was supremely exciting,” says Sircar (Sircar, “Purono” 72). At a get-together soon afterwards, the enthused Sircar pestered MacIntosh with questions. “That was a moment of transition in my life. Thousands of questions swarmed inside. I felt that they had the answers to many of those” (Sircar, “Purono” 73). The brief interaction, however, was insufficient for Sircar and, quite in a state of bewilderment and enthusiasm, he called them up and rushed to their hotel.
Around the same time, in early 1972, with more politically charged theatre workers joining Satabdi, the nature of the group had also started changing. All of them were young, and fresh from the political cauldron of the Calcutta of the late 1960s, specifically the quaking terrain of the ongoing Naxalite Movement (Bandyopadhyay 16–17, 69–70; Roy 18–19). Fortune too, says Sircar, favoured them as he met Anthony Serchio, likely in Calcutta, and the members of Satabdi could participate in a series of workshops where they learnt, “among other things, the set of basic exercises known as the ‘cat series’ evolved by Grotowski” (Sircar, “On Theatre” 24)—a process that helps develop an acute awareness of the motivation behind every physical action. This early exposure was further complemented by Sircar’s trip to the USA in July–August 1972. Sircar acknowledges that the foundation of the workshops, which he moulded according to his need and context, was consolidated during his stay in the USA (Bandyopadhyay 68). He saw, participated in, and learnt from the works of The Performance Group; met, saw rehearsals, and discussed with Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre in Brooklyn; as well as saw productions off- and off-off-Broadway. This experience not only gave him insights into the workshop process which he had been venturing to learn but also a keener perception of “a new language of communication” (Sircar, “On Theatre” 27).
The preparatory phase of Third Theatre, as we shall see in the following section “The Process,” offers a space for collective experience and fellow feeling—preparing the mind as well as the body to “react” rather than to “enact.” For this reason, Sircar did not favour using the term “training” for the Third Theatre workshops (Bandyopadhyay 91). He unambiguously clarifies the (political) position of the workshops: “The approach of this [Third Theatre] workshop is not theatre, but human beings. First a human, then theatre” (Bandyopadhyay 93).
In the Third Theatre, the workshop is a space for experiencing and embodying, and not for enacting and learning effective delivery of dialogues and modulation of voices to express emotional states. Through theatre games, a Third Theatre performer attempts to reach a level of consciousness where the mind and the body react to the impulses received from the script or the situations in a play, or to the stimuli received during a performance; and of these, hunger has remained one of the primary elements.
As a participant-observer, I had the opportunity to experience the workshop thrice at several places in West Bengal with different facilitators: 25–31 December 2016 at Halishahar conducted by Lopa Sircar and Dulal Kar, 18–23 July 2018 at Santiniketan by Debashis Chakraborty and Debashis Mondal, and 26–29 July 2018 at Kalyani by Sumit Biswas. The workshops begin with the establishment of the circle through a game—“Passing the Energy.” Everyone, including the facilitator(s), is a part of the circle. The facilitator asks all the participants to sit in a circle keeping their knees in contact with their adjacent ones, the left hand resting on the left knee with palm upwards, and the right hand holding the left hand of the next right. The formation of this chain starts building a psycho-physical bond. The discipline of the circle is also established: “In the circle, nobody can sit behind another, so there are no back-benchers and no difference in status” (Sircar, “On Theatre” 40). Starting with the facilitator, the participants introduce themselves. They are also asked to talk a bit about why they have joined the workshop and what they expect of it.
Once the introduction is over, the facilitator drives home certain fundamental precepts of the games. S/he makes clear that there is “no shame, no blame,” “no competition, only cooperation,” “no winners or losers” in the workshop. It is emphasised that theatre is a place of communication among living human beings, its efficacy is in the “here and now”; its “liveness” makes it powerful. The workshop, it is reiterated, is not a place for acquiring histrionic skills or showing off one’s performative brilliance. Most of the participants, as I have found from my direct involvement or through post-workshop discussions elsewhere, do not join with that intention either. Suvobrata Roy Chowdhury, speaking of Sircar’s workshops at the Visva-Bharati in 1994–95 recalls that of those who attended his workshops, “not all of them [were] performers or artists who wanted to perform. It was a self-enhancement workshop for most of us” (Jain 292). Third Theatre workshops, thus, inculcate community consciousness, sharing, feeling, and building relationships. It is an internal exploration which values participation more than perfection in the process of nurturing a sahridaya—an empathetic being—one who would feel and be sensitive to the plight of the characters s/he embodies and represents.[3]
That the circle carries both physical as well as symbolic value, is also registered through the game. Sitting in the initial position discussed above, hand-in-hand, the facilitator first presses the palm of the next member. The one who feels the impulse, first receives the energy by reciprocating the action, first on the initiator and then passing to the next. Thus, the wave of energy “returns manifold” when shared, opines the facilitator. It is the individual’s experience of the collective that drives the Third Theatre workshops.
Third Theatre workshops are guided, not by a “director” who instructs how one must enact, but by a “facilitator” who informs the participants to feel and react. The attempt of these workshops is, hence, to nurture imaginative and affective selves rather than produce receptive objects or “director’s actors.” The efficacy of the games lies in their exploratory potential and their dramatic and aesthetic richness. In fact, like any game, theatre games, as a performative tool, undercuts the very idea of enactment. Rather, as Clive Barker notes, games “[reinstate] the non-reflective body/think mechanisms” (Barker 64). It is for this reason that observers are not allowed during the workshops. For, the presence of observers ruptures the spontaneity. Also, for the same reason, there is no space for an external “director” but a participant facilitator—a “referee” (Jain 288). The mode of practice is established thoroughly when even the seventy-eight-year-old Sircar, suffering from an arthritic knee, refuses to sit on a chair during the workshop process in Laos in 2003. He declared that if he could not sit alongside the participants, it would no longer remain a workshop: “I have to sit in the same circle at the same level with them” (Sircar, “Probas-er” 128).
The feeling of togetherness which initiates with the formation of the circle binds the Third Theatre workshops. There are no games or activities that do not reinforce the ensemble. Even so, certain games make us specifically aware of the bond. One such game played towards the end of the workshops is what I call “Embodying the Narrative.” Framed in an immersive popular storytelling mode of Bengal—Kathokata, Sumit Biswas at the Kalyani workshop declared that there were no rules for this game except that we needed to move within the space and respond to the story that we shall hear, that is, to react physically as well as emotionally. At that point, multiple variations of “Space Covering” or games of working with the space had already been played.
“It is a long story about a family of twenty-one members,” began the story at a very slow pace—twenty-one being the number of participants in that workshop.
This family lives near the river, their source of livelihood—farming. However, there has been no rain for a long time now. The riverbeds are drying up, gradually. All the members of the family stare at the glaring sky. No trace of cloud can be noticed. No hope of rain. Despair starts to engulf everyone.
(Pause)
The river is completely dry now.
(Long Pause.)
Suddenly, they see a trace of a cloud, a dark one—a promise of better days. Happiness slowly overcomes their dull countenance. And then a drop of water, a drop of bliss; a shower ensues. Everyone becomes rejuvenated, with life, with joy. They feel the rain, they dance; they are merry.
(Pause)
The river starts to flow once again. They run to the river, excited. They know that the days of farming are near; that they would start growing crops.
(Long Pause.)
But days pass, and the downpour continues. The river is flowing in its full majesty now. Soon the water starts streaming into the farm, and then into their home. The water has inundated their room; it is ankle-deep. Everyone is anxious. They look at each other. They stare cluelessly as the water streams farther up to their chest. They try to keep themselves over the surface.
(Pause)
The level of water is increasing very fast now. They gasp for breath as the water starts choking them. In no time, the water is now flowing over their head. They swim, as long as they can, but it exhausts them slowly. They drown, one after another.
(Long Pause.)
The river was their destiny.
(Longer Pause.)[4]
The sense of family that this river-story builds upon had been developing among the participants over the four days of the workshop. The game offered an immersive synesthetic experience—a psychophysical process. As the story unfolded, I sensed an escalation of emotions. The use of the present tense prompted immediacy and attachment. We made eye contact with one another and our movement was necessarily slow. The physical rhythm reflected our mental state. The pauses in the narrative made us reflect, introspect, and relate with others. With the winding flow of the narrative taking a pleasant turn, I could feel the exuberance within me, as it was among others, only to be thwarted by the utter desolation at the end. We remained on the floor with our eyes closed, brimming with an excess of emotions. Some of us opened our eyes slowly, some two or three minutes later, held the hands of others, helping them stand up while the eyes moistened. Some took time in isolation to normalise the impact, while others helped those in a severe emotional state.
The episode allowed me to reflect on how group dynamics can change owing to the abundance or shortage of resources. Secondly, it also underscores that the workshop space is pitted against the outside-world based on competition—a world which the Third Theatre strives to change. Thus, one may consider the workshop as an inverse-hyperreal space; as a counter (and, therefore, critique) of both the competitive social structure and postmodern nihilism through humanism.
Owing to long spells of drought and flood, the experience of hunger is widespread in this part of the sub-continent. Hence, the narrative was quite relatable; for some of us, it was real. For many of the Third Theatre practitioners and audience, hunger is/ has been an everyday negotiation. Sometimes the affect is so strong that members of the audience join up Third Theatre groups.[5] One such veteran member of Satabdi—Krishna Ghosh, now in her 60s, recalls her experience of watching Janmobhumi Aj (Motherland, Today) in the mid-1980s: “The play was not just a performance—it was the representation of the experiences of my childhood—the difficulties of it—suffering, pain, and hunger. Through my experience, I knew very well what it meant to be hungry. […] When I saw the play, I could relate to it so deeply, as if those were my own words” (personal interview). Ghosh could not only join in the feeling of hunger represented but it also propelled her to join the group. Moreover, as observed during my field, I opine that the reaction continues to inform her work in the Third Theatre.
But how does one represent hunger when the experience of it varies in degrees? In the context of the production Manushe Manushe (Among Humankind, 1981)[6] Bishakha Roy discusses her journey through the process in detail: “In our knowledge and existence, hunger is far away. To travel this distance slowly became our purpose. […] With a roti in hand, we began our journey. Grabbing it, we started swallowing pieces of the dry roti. Eventually, we reached another state of being. The familiar ‘I’ was lost. Not enactment, experiencing hunger with our entire being, we felt that we were crossing our boundaries. […] Even though for a short while, we had experienced the might of hunger. This is what we identified as honest sensibility. […] The language of this theatre is simultaneously aesthetic and political” (Roy 126–31). In a similar vein, referring to the 1973 Anganmancha production of Spartacus, Sircar states that the performers “explored and discovered the hidden potential of their bodies, of their voices,” for “we were not just rehearsing a play set down in definite terms by the playwright but confronting a script to create live theatre out of it” (Sircar, “On Theatre” 24–25).
The Third Theatre workers have come to realise through their practice that the technique behind an honest expression is not theatrical imitation or abhinay. Rather, to effectively connect with the audience, the performers need to undergo the process of anubhav or experiencing the truth, both physically and emotionally, of what they wish to represent. A workshop is that space for exploring that expression. The affect of “feel” can be generated only when each of the Third Theatre workers immerses in the content and feels that as closely as possible. This process of critical immersion, we find, is not an enactment but an affective engagement.
However, when Sircar tried to use Manushe Manushe as a work-in-progress presentation with the students of the Department of Drama, University of Birmingham in 1992, he noticed that the students initially failed to connect with the theme of hunger. He then shared his first-hand experience of the great Bengal famine of 1943—how people died on the footpaths of the city, how the several community kitchens were largely insufficient for the desperate populace, and how the majority of the populace still restrained from engaging in plunder.[7] “The expressions through the Mirroring and Chain-mirroring games which followed on the theme of hunger, even though from their secondary experience, were surprising,” states Sircar (Bandyopadhyay 161). This transformation, I contend, could be effected as the participants started to react to the narrative visualisation of hunger spun by Sircar, producing an affective embodiment of the realities of hunger similar to my experiential learning through the episode on “river.”
To explore truthful expressions, first-hand experiences are also gathered from far and wide. The Third Theatre workers note these down in what they call the “Book of Feelings.” The Third Theatre collective, we find, is both informed by such personal, individual experiences and is, simultaneously, enriched through the shared embodiment of those individual moments. Bishakha Roy recalls how their visits to the Sundarbans, the messy slums at Howrah and Kashipur around Calcutta, a school for the children at Munsibazar—the settings of Satabdi’s production Bhoma (1976)—got assimilated into their consciousness and even made their way into the script (see Roy “Third”). The play foregrounds the rural/urban divide and the nonchalance of the comparatively affluent city-dwellers towards the scores of Bhoma-s who starve to their systemic death in the villages and on the city pavements. The “Indifference” game uses an excerpt from the play where Bhoma seeks just a little financial assistance for farming, a loan, which would be sufficient to enable him to harvest a handsome produce. His distress call, however, is returned with absolute apathy. Dipankar Dutta records his initial experience of the process where the eagerness in his eyes met with the coldness of five others who surrounded him, so indifferent that they seemed dead. As the game continued, he started feeling the tension between the absolute helplessness of the moment one must confront and the dire necessity to communicate the plight (Dutta, “Amar” 16). This is akin to my experience of the game where we took turns to perform Bhoma, an embodiment of the experiences—individual as well as collective—that we undergo in our everyday existence.
In Theatre-er Bhasha Sircar states, “hunger, injustice, killings, torture, war, nuclear weapons—we know all of these, keep all knowledge, do not feel” (42). But, “when we feel,” says Julian Beck in The Life of the Theatre, “we will feel the emergency; when we feel the emergency, we will act; when we act, we will change the world” (33). A political-philosophical-theatrical position connects the two spatially divided practices in political theatre articulated here by Sircar and Beck. They emphasise feeling or reaction as a performative method that empowers the performer-activist to embody the essentially political act of representing hunger. The Third Theatre’s Internal Workshop offers the performers an avenue of communicating hunger while remaining critically and politically aware of the acuteness of the absence—a counterpoint to Cozzi’s argument on the (un)representability of hunger. Such representation, I contend, does not generate reactions of pity and fear (and, in extension, resignation) but of resistance. For, every step of a Third Theatre workshop is a constant dialogue with oneself with respect to the impulses one receives—primary or secondary. The embodiment of hunger in Third Theatre, therefore, does not lead to a passive acceptance of the condition but towards a collective act of defiance in, through, and beyond theatre. What then ensues is a fellow feeling not only among the performers but also with and among the audience, who are moved to join the movement as performers or as audience patrons.[8]
I thank my doctoral supervisor, Arjun Ghosh, for his advice and constant encouragement. My sincere gratitude to Sumit Biswas (Late), a Third Theatre activist who helped by getting me introduced to the Third Theatre network. Without his active support, I would not be able to gain insights into the Internal Workshop process which has been invaluable for my argument. I thank the editors, Jazmin Llana and Michael Peterson, and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments and suggestions over multiple iterations of this paper.
[1] Popular by the names of Anganmancha and Muktamancha, the first refers to theatre-in-the-round or arena theatre while the latter demarcates an open-air theatre performed on the ground. The terms are portmanteaus wherein “angan” refers to an uncovered yard, fully or partially confined, in front of a house (a usual phenomenon of traditional households in Bengal) and “mukta” means open. “Mancha” refers to performance space which may or may not have a raised platform or a stage.
[2] Satabdi was founded by Sircar in 1967 as a proscenium group following the Group Theatre model in West Bengal. For details on Group Theatre, one may see Banerji “Contemporary.”
[3] This is not to undermine the value of and the strive towards aesthetic perfection in Third Theatre productions. The importance of aesthetics has been noted variously, especially by Sircar in Theatre-er Bhasha. However, workshops being the initial phase of the process, primacy is laid on whole-hearted participation and solidarity formation.
[4] Translated from field notes.
[5] Here I use “affect” in the sense of referring to “a feeling or subjective experience accompanying a thought or action or occurring in response to a stimulus; an emotion, a mood. In later use also (usually as a mass noun): the outward display of emotion or mood, as manifested by facial expression, posture, gestures, tone of voice, etc.” (OED, s.v. “affect [n., def. 5b]”).
[6] The production is a phenomena-based workshop-in-the-raw.
[7] In fact, it was this watershed moment which triggered Bijon Bhattacharya’s classic Nabanna (The Harvest Festival) and its 1944 production by Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). For details, one may see Arjun Ghosh’s “Introduction” to his translation of Bhattacharya’s play.
[8] As a free theatre movement, Third Theatre sustains itself through voluntary contributions collected at the end of each performance. A towel is laid at the centre of the arena. The Third Theatre activists, however, call these contributions “participation” and not “donation.”
[9] Not to be confused with Sircar’s Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Memorial Lecture (1981) – “The Changing Language of Theatre,” included in Sircar’s On Theatre.
All translations from the original Bangla texts are mine.
Bandyopadhyay, Samik. Badal Sircar: Ebong Indrajit theke Third Theatre (Badal Sircar: From ‘And Indrajit’ to Third Theatre). Thema, 2017.
Banerji, Arnab. Contemporary Group Theatre in Kolkata, India. Routledge, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429261954
Barker, Clive. Theatre Games: A New Approach to Drama Training. Eyre Methuen, 1977. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350054752
Beck, Julian. The Life of the Theatre: The Relation of the Artist to the Struggle of the People. New Foreword by Judith Malina. Limelight Editions, 1986.
Bharucha, Rustom. Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theatre of Bengal. Seagull Books, 1983.
Bhattacharya, Bijon. Nabanna: Of Famine and Resilience: A Play, Translated by Arjun Ghosh. Rupa, 2018.
Cozzi, Enzo. “Hunger and the Future of Performance.” Performance Research, vol. 4, no. 1, 1999, pp. 121–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1999.10871652
Dutta, Dipankar. “Amar Chokh-e” (Through My Eyes). Bhinno Prothar Theatre-er Mukhopatro: Ritam (Frontispiece of the Theatre of a Different Kind: Ritam), no. 12, 1984, pp. 15–17.
Ghosh, Krishna. Personal Interview. 16 June 2019.
Jain, Kirti. Badal Sircar: Search for a Language of Theatre. Niyogi Books, 2016. Natrang Pratisthan Series on Modern Indian Theatre.
Roy, Bishakha. Third Theatre: Anya Swar, Anya Nirman (Third Theatre: A Different Voice, a Different Making). Thema, 2017.
Sircar, Badal. On Theatre: Selected Essays. Seagull Books, 2009.
———. Probas-er Hijibiji (Gibberish from Abroad). Lekhani, 2006.
———. Purono Kasundi (Fermented Mustard Sauce). Vol. 3. Lekhani, 2008.
———. Theatre-er Bhasha (The Language of Theatre).[9] Raktokarobi, 2002.
Trowsdale, Jo. “Sitting in Badal’s Circle: Artist and pedagogue; the theatre of Badal Sircar.” Research in Drama Education, vol. 2, no. 1, 1997, pp. 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356978970020104