World Theatre Day: Remembering the NSDF and Ebrahim Alkaji

 

 

27th March is commemorated as the World Theatre Day, ever since it was first celebrated by the International Theatre Institute (ITI) on 27 March, 1961. Theatre is one of the effective ways of communicating science to the people and that too in an entertaining way. Theatre in India, is one of the oldest art forms, alongside music and dance that continue to thrive in modern days. Theatrical performances of mythological stories like Ramayana and Mahabharata and, the most renowned of all the plays, Shakuntala provide us an insight to the rich historical traditions of theatre in India.  Indian Drama, over the years, beginning from the ancient Vedic Age, has moved on to the classical theatre traditions, influencing the modern theatre. Looking back in time, the historicity of theatre in India is evidenced in the Rig Veda. The epics of Ramayana, Mahabharata and Artha Shastra are instilled with specific techniques of dramas. Sages Valmiki and Vyas and Panini have shed decisive light on theatre and Patanjali has heartily contributed in his Mahabhashya that there existed two dramas, namely - Kamsa Vadha and Vali Vadha. Actors not only served as dancers but also as musicians.  Bharata Muni, is acknowledged to be a legendary author of the Natyashastra, the very first Sanskrit work on dramaturgy. The treatise says that Bharata was the one who popularised the Natyaveda, created by Brahma, on the Earth. He is also said to have collected all the material of earlier acharyas like Tumburu, Narada and Nandi and gave the Nayashastra a complete coherence by making additions, alterations and adaptations according to the requirements of time and space.

 

 British cultural anthropologist, Victor Turner, has said; “for cultures to survive and grow, we need exploratory moments when we can step out of the routines of our busy life into a selective, dramatic re-enactment to express public opinion and sentiments on key issues of our communities. We become so narrowly focused on every day, pragmatic efforts to make our communities and societies ‘work’ that we forget where we are going in life”. This is why we need a cultural space which is midway between the utopian, mythic aspirations of our communities and the daily struggle to survive. Theatre provides this cultural space in which actors symbolically represent the struggle of the community, but in a frame of plot resolution that points to the searching debates to possible idealized goals.

 

Theatre is as old as human community, which has emerged as religious-civic ritual, lyric poetry, and popular entertainment and as political protest in virtually every culture across the world and so has it been for India. No essay on theatre in India will be complete without remembering Ebrahim Alkaji. a doyen of Indian theatre who founded the National School of Drama. I had the honour while serving as the Director of NGMA Mumbai to host an exhibition of Ebrahim Alkazi and I also had paid my tribute to him when he bid adieu to this world. Those who are interested may like to read my tribute on my blog whose link is appended below.

https://khened.blogspot.com/2020/08/eulogy-for-ebrahim-alkazi-doyen-of.html

 This essay of mine, however, is confined to Science Theatre (Drama) and how this medium was effectively used for science communication by Science Museums in India under the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM). Theatre can combine elements of art, music and sport, and develop students’ creativity and so also their fitness and their emotional and aesthetic awareness. As team activities, theatre promotes communication and co-operation among young learners.  Theatre can be used as an effective medium of learning while being entertained. It can convey, with a substantial dose of theatricality, important and socially relevant information generally not available on the stage in to the minds of general public. 

Science theatre is increasingly staged across the globe because it can play an important role in science communication while also effectively addressing social, ethical and moral issues that stem from rapid developments in science and technology in the current era, which is inextricably linked to S&T. Science Centres in India including the Nehru Science Centre, Mumbai, have used this medium effectively in science communication. National Science Drama Festival (NSDF), which is one of most effective programmes of NCSM, is an ongoing annual creative event for the school students. The World Theatre Day is celebrated to create an awareness on the significance of theatre.

 Modern science has dramatically changed the world around us and is affecting all our lives in many ways. We hear buzz words like global warming, gene therapy, stem-cell research, nanotechnology, radiation, etc. every day. Moreover, we begin to realize that beyond dealing with intriguing discoveries and technical problems, scientific progress has social and ethical implications that should be addressed by the society. In contemporary theatre this is reflected by an increasing number of ’science plays'. Theatre can play an important role in effective science communication and also help in removing superstition and blind beliefs. Science Plays or Theatre are now increasingly focusing their attention on societal and ethical issues and creating awareness on socially relevant scientific issues that are so essential for the modern world.  Theatre has been used as one of the effective ways of communication in driving home the message of the efficacy of vaccines in India and perhaps this is one reason why vaccine hesitancy in India is much less than in most of the western countries. The theatre and so also art in its various forms, help in communicating science to the masses.

NCSM started using theatre as a medium to engage school students in researching on scientific and technological subjects and in scripting, directing and enacting plays to express their opinion on diverse scientific and technological issues. Students who perform in these plays as directors and actors are not renowned artists, yet their performance and their approach in addressing scientific issues with ethical and social aspects have been truly praiseworthy. Over the years the National Science Drama Festival (NSDF), organised every year by the NCSM, which, starts at the block level and progresses to the District to the State to the Zonal and finally to the National level, has become one of the most popular science communication medium of the Council. Ten teams, two respective winner teams from the five zones; North, South, East, West and North East, are selected to participate at the National Science Drama Festival. Leading theatre personalities and scientists who have witnessed the dramas at different levels, especially the ones that are selected to participate at the National Level, have showered high praises and commended the thoughtful thinking of the students in presenting their plays in the most professional way.

The students who take part in the NSDF carry out extensive research on their chosen subjects and prepare their script and enact their plays in a most effective manner to try and address the social and ethical issues that come with the cutting edge research on scientific and technological developments while highlighting their benefits. 

Theatrical actions link education and entertainment, consequently becoming a highly effective didactic instrument. Science museums across the world are using this medium as an interpretative technique to communicate science from the point of view of the goals pursued by museums, of epistemology and of theatrical research. Hopefully, theatrical communication of science will become common practice among practitioners of public understanding of science. Science and theatre, two different human activities, each with their own historical background and specific features, began to interact in the past, and today they are “strangely” linked. There is a real interaction, starting from theatre and ending with science or, vice versa, starting in a scientific setting and developing theatrical features. Or, again, new relations are the fruit of meetings between researchers, actors, directors, philosophers and scientific communicators.

The phrase “scientific theatre” has been coined only recently, but it has immediately produced a lot of heated debate and questions. Providing a definition of scientific theatre is no easy task: the relationship between science and theatre is so variegated as to defy any precise expression. The definition would in any case remain ambiguous, as it indicates an extremely wide range of experiences. Theatre, contemporary or not, has often drawn on the world of science and has often expressed its conceptions about it. The union between theatre and science exists also in other domains, pertaining neither to criticism nor to rational reflections: the universe of human passions. Science activity is a particular way of making sense of the world that mankind has created, which is not only a cognitive process but is also characterised by passion, it is a story of passions. So the main goal of scientific theatre is to come into contact with these passions, to understand those who have felt them and to put these passions on stage. In this way theatre offers an original and riveting way to deal with the greatest questions about the sense of the world, life and science, questions which, on the contrary, would risk remaining abstract and vague.

Scientific theatre teaches scientific facts and concepts at the same time as it entertains the public. The elaboration and production of “ideal” scientific theatre performances seem to require, however, a close cooperation between scientists, researchers, scientific philosophers, playwrights, directors, actors, scientific communicators and animators: only in this way can service quality be guaranteed, with regard to the educational content, the communicative effectiveness and the epistemological awareness. When using theatre as a means to communicate science and ideas, epistemological problems immediately arise, since a debate on science cannot be conducted without giving (and having, more or less consciously) an image of it. So what is the image of science emerging from such shows is of paramount importance.

 Some of the recent science dramas which have received international acclaim include the plays “Oxygen” by Carl Djcrassi. This play tries to answer the question, “Who discovered oxygen?” The setting for Oxygen is based on a fictional encounter between Lavoisier, Priestley, Sheele and their wives, at the invitation of King Gustav III.  The place of the discussion is Stockholm, in the year 1777.  The Central question is, “Who discovered oxygen?” The play is also about doing science, politics and ambitions.  There are other plays on science by Michael Frayn which suggest a wide public interest in the history of science as well as in science itself. This play is based on the meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 in German-occupied Denmark where they discussed the possibility and consequences of harnessing nuclear power.  The play is also about loyalty, suspicion and friendship.  The setting for Copenhagen is more modest: Heisenberg is in the home of the Bohrs, with Mrs. Bohr as an important participant.  Here the central question is, “Why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen?”  Both plays have been praised for the excellence of their dramatic design as well as for the correctness of their historical and scientific content.  They received high acclaim from historians of science and scientists alike.  What is important is that both plays have elicited much public and academic discussion.

 Science Museums and Centres across the globe have now started using science dramas as an effective medium of science communication. London Science Museum, for instance, engaged an actor in 1987, and has now an entire theatre company with a repertoire of more than forty performances ranging from real plays on stage to character monologues presented in the halls of the museum. Theatrical performances vary: there may be single actors presenting themselves as renowned scientists of the past, or even groups of actors representing chemical elements like hydrogen atoms or even biological cells.

Science Plays on biographies of scientists have been phenomenally successful. Ramanujan’s life story is so awe inspiring that movies and plays about him have been and are being produced. The first was a superb documentary about Ramanujan in the famous Nova series of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) on television, which described some of his most appealing mathematical contributions in lay terms and some of the most startling aspects of his life, such as the episode of the taxi cab number 1729. In 2007 a play entitled   A Disappearing Number was conceived and directed by the English playwright Simon McBurney for the Theatre Complicite Company. It first played at the Theater Royal in Plymouth, England, and won three very prestigious awards in England in 2007. This play was also performed at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, India, in August 2010. The latest theatrical production on Ramanujan is a movie that is now being produced in India based on Kanigel’s book The Man Who Knew Infinity.

 Many of the science plays, including some described above are examples of the theatre being inspired by the exciting and often mind-blowing stories of science. But it is intriguing that the traffic has not been one way. Increasingly science is exploiting the vehicle of theatre to communicate its ideas. London Science Museum has created a piece of narrative theatre called the Energy Show to teach kids about energy.  

Ever since NCSM started the National Science Drama Festival there are countless such examples where message of science, ethical and social messages, the concepts on science and biographical portrayal of life and works of scientists have been very effectively portrayed. This year will be no exception. However, what is needed is a close cooperation between scientists, researchers, scientific philosophers, playwrights, directors, actors, scientific communicators and other professionals only in this way can service quality be guaranteed, with regard to the educational content, the communicative effectiveness and the epistemological awareness, which it is hoped will happen sooner than later.  

Wishing you all a very happy World Theatre Day.

Images - Courtesy - Nehru Science Centre, Mumbai and BITM, Kolkata

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