FORTHCOMING

Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Poetry of Kabir Linda Hess

Two men, 500 years apart, make contact with each other in the realms of poetry, music and performance. Kumar Gandharva, the great twentieth-century Hindustani classical vocalist, sings Kabir, the great fifteenth-century poet of inner and outer experience. They meet on a field that is called nirgun, nirakar, shunya: without qualities, without boundaries, empty. Long ago, Kabir composed poetry that evoked this space that challenged listeners to know it and to know themselves. Kumar Gandharva is drawn to Kabir and other poets of nirgun experience. He seeks the voice that can actually sing emptiness. Despite his formidable accomplishment as a classical musician, he tries to learn from folksingers and wanderers who may have no musical skill but who have the voice of emptiness.
This volume introduces an extraordinary Indian musician, a powerful and popular religious poet and their coming together in performance. It includes a substantial introductory essay, bilingual texts of 30 songs, a CD with selected songs by Kumar Gandharva, and contributions by two renowned Indian writers, U. R. Ananthamurthy and Ashok Vajpeyi.

Linda Hess teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University and is co-director of Stanford’s Center for South Asia. Her previous work on North Indian bhakti poetry and performance includes The Bijak of Kabir (2002) and numerous articles on Kabir, Tulsidas and Ramlila performance.

Theatre of Roots Redirecting The Modern Indian Stage Erin B. Mee

After Independence, in 1947, Indian theatre practitioners began turning to their ‘roots’ in classical dance, religious ritual, martial arts, popular entertainment and Sanskrit aesthetic theory in their efforts to create an ‘Indian’ theatre that was different from the Westernized theatre of the colonial era and prevalent in urban areas at the time. The Theatre of Roots—as this movement was known—is the first conscious effort at creating a body of work for urban audiences combining modern European theatre with traditional Indian performance while maintaining its distinction from both. The movement offered an important strategy for reassessing colonial ideology and culture and for articulating and defining a newly emerging ‘India’ by addressing the politics of aesthetics and by challenging the visual practices, performer/spectator relationships, dramaturgical structures and aesthetic goals of colonial performance.
Mee offers an in-depth analysis of the roots movement in historical perspective: its innovations, theories, goals, accomplishments, problems and legacies, examines in detail the work of three distinguished artists from three very different cultures within India—Kavalam Narayana Panikkar (Kerala), Girish Karnad (Karnataka) and Ratan Thiyam (Manipur) and investigates the artistic agendas and policies of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama which helped formulate and direct the roots movement.

Crucible Bodies Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium Tadashi Uchino

A collection of essays written over the last 10 years by Tadashi Uchino, a prominent performance studies scholar living in Tokyo, Japan covering a wide range of historical and theoretical topics, from Brecht in Japan to ‘children’s’ bodies in postmodern Japanese performances, from the notion of beauty in contemporary cultural theory to practical and theoretical readings of more recent intercultural performances, involving not only Japanese but also other Asian theatre practitioners. It is one of the first full-length studies of Japanese performance culture written in English by a Japanese, and there is much to uncover in what is happening in Japan’s cultural scene at the moment. Uchino’s theoretical implications, however, easily transcend narrow fields such as Japanese Studies or Theatre Studies and are an important contribution to the developing academic arena of Performance Studies.