About this Event
In the second of a four-part lecture series, Rustom Bharucha will reflect on how the ‘intracultural’ has deeply influenced his understanding of cultural differences through performance and diverse forms of activism. Elaborating on how the ‘intracultural’ focuses on those minute local and regional differences that are often ignored in larger understandings of the nation, he will attempt to show how it can question and subvert the imagined homogeneity of the nation-state through differences operating at the level of community, caste, language, gender and religion.
Reflecting on how the ‘intracultural’ emerged in his theatrical journey out of an ‘intercultural’ theatre project, he will share some of his formative lessons in teaching and directing students at the Ninasam Theatre Institute in the village of Heggodu in Karnataka, India. Acknowledging Ninasam as the laboratory of his intracultural experiments in performance, he will go on to describe some of his grassroots interactions with marginalized communities in India, notably the Siddi (persons of African descent) struggling to deal with issues relating to land, memory, livelihood and caste.
Arguing against the assumed privileges of the metropolis, this lecture will call attention to the ways in which a performative engagement with local, regional, and rural contexts can shape a deeper intracultural understanding of cultural difference. How can this knowledge result in a different envisioning of the cultural economy? And how may it help to question the entitlement inherent in dominant practices and epistemologies of performance?
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
University of Kent, Grimond Lecture Theatre 1, Canterbury, United Kingdom
USD 0.00
