The Arshinagar Project is inviting proposals for the Ghosts of Shakespeare Festival 2014, which will take place in the city of Kolkata, India, between April 23rd and 30th, 2014.
Background:
Ghosts of Shakespeare is an annual festival that is meant to confront the world of Shakespeare (primarily) from the vantage of Indian performance idioms and aesthetics, as well as contemporary subjectivities and lived experience. It is meant to exist, both physically and metaphorically, in marginal spaces. This means that it intends to explore non-traditional venues, including open and public spaces, as well as reach out to genres other than traditional theatre, such as dance, performance art, street theatre and other forms of theatre activism, and genres which defy any easy categorization. It looks at Shakespeare as a talisman of protest and humanistic articulation, and hence embraces artistic actions that articulate disturbing and perhaps unpopular truths about the world and times we inhabit.
Keeping in mind our essentially trans-disciplinary nature (performance research, social action and theoretical discourse), we are interested in exploring Shakespeare as a living, and often disquieting presence, not as a dead icon of elitism.
'Ghosts of shakespeare' reflects this - that Shakespeare has a contemporary afterlife in often unexpected forms. The spirit of it deliberately draws upon the anarchic ethos of small-scale, alternative fringe festivals in different parts of the world. We are interested in creative acts which are not big and well-funded, but rather which have rough-edges and are vulnerable. We'd like to bring together established names, emerging artists, as well as campus outfits on the same platform, without creating hierarchies. We are interested in the Shakespeare of in-betweens: between past and present, between east and west, between the sacral and the scatological - a sort of liminal Shakespeare.
The 2014 Edition:
For the 2014 edition, which happens to be Shakespeare's 450th birth anniversary, we are interested in looking at Shakespeare 'translated'. By this we do not mean mere performances of Shakespeare in languages other than English, but his 'translation', much in the same sense that Bottom, in the Dream is 'translated', into other societal contexts, forms of mytho-poesis and performance idioms.
We are looking at performances, performative talks, workshop proposals and other un-defined propositions. It could, for instance, be a solo performance for one spectator, taking place in a bedroom, or an ensemble piece on a staircase, a duo in a drawing room or terrace, or something that oscillates between a wokshop and a talk. The only conditions are these:1) The total size of the team, including cast and crew, cannot exceed six
2) The performance has to be made for or be adaptable to non-proscenium venues. We have as venues, homes, galleries, private gardens as well as public places like the banks of the Hooghly river and parks, street-sides, etc.
3) Ghosts of Shakespeare is by principle a non-ticketed, zero-budget festival. This means we are unable to pay a performance fee or reimburse travel expenses. We will, however, host you in Kolkata and take care of you all your local expenses. At the end of each performance, we will take collections from the audience and pass this on to the artist(s).
· Name of the Artist/Group
· Name of the piece/presentation/intervention
· Genre (optional)
· Total size of the ensemble (including performers/technicians/others)
· Duration
· Technical requirements
· Brief synopsis (100 words max)
. Links to online videos of the performance or previous work
The deadline for sending in proposals is February 15th, and we will inform selected artists/presenters by March 1st. For further details and updates, please visit facebook.com/GhostsOfShakespeare
Warmly,
The Arshinagar Project Team
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