Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

A reflective writing of a process of writing, this paper follows a process of ‘practical philosophy’ in a tribal village in India. Through the production of a cultural artefact, a theatre script, the paper marks a questioning of the normalcy and the complacency that the rural development discourse has lulled us all into. How does art and the writing of a theatre script that draws heavily from cultures of living, being and doing; challenge the common-sensical understanding of a space, dehaat (can roughly translated into rural), that has been deemed as backward and lacking by the standard structures of capitalism and development and how can it pave the way for the (re)covering and crafting of a new concept, their concept, that will engender the contingent and emergent work of transformative praxis and be indicative of new becomings? Art can also be seen as the connecting force between the different bodies that wrote the theatre script together; that thought of ways to produce their life differently and creatively; where each and every word, phrase and event in the script is a way to reinvent the whole process of thinking and living; of creating new styles of perception by exposing the rigidity in the existing styles of perception. Writing of the script here, gave us a way to move beyond the representational structure, to transform life, to inaugurate non-representational relations that are indicative of becoming.