A History Of The Jana Natya Manch: Plays For Th...
Loud and clear, street plays in India are not just an art form, but also a means of voicing opinions and protesting; with some acts being monumental enough to leave their mark in the history of Indian theatre.
A History of the Jana Natya Manch: Plays for th...
Literary scholars and linguists have argued extensively that language is not simply a purely representational vehicle of thought, but its determining medium: the ordering powers of which not only shape cognisance of reality but are actively involved in processes of imperialism and cultural erasure. It is the determinative yet slippery quality of language, prompting the loss of meaning in attempts at translation, that colonial powers manipulated to violent effect and which, as enacted in the plays of Indigenous Australian playwright, Jack Davis, continue to haunt history and the present. This paper will consider how a history and culture that was made unspeakable by colonialism, through the erasure of Indigenous Australian oral traditions, languages, and historical perspectives, is translated onto the Anglophone stage in the plays of Davis, one of the first Indigenous playwrights to be published and performed internationally, and how this was received by the witnessing audience. I argue that he achieves this theatrical translation not only through the negotiation and manipulation of colonial language and verbatim history alongside Indigenous languages, enacting a kind of linguistic double-consciousness, but also through physical theatre and dance: the central means of communicating meaning and knowledge in Nyoongar culture. 041b061a72
