ANUJA GHOSALKAR is the founder of Drama Queen, a documentary theatre company evolving a unique form of theatre in India since 2015. Her practice focuses on personal histories, archival absences and blurring the hierarchies between audience and performer, to extend the idea of theatre and create audacious work. Iterations around form and process, modes of (social) media, sites, technologies, reclaiming narratives on gender and intimacy are critical to her performance making and pedagogy. As artist-in-residence at Art Lab Gnesta, Sweden, she created her debut show, Lady Anandi, which travelled extensively across India, and was showcased independently in Berlin and Stockholm. Her performances and workshops have been programmed by the University of Oxford (Along The Lines), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Serendipity Arts Festival, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Forum Transregionale Studien, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, First Post, Kerala Museum, and FLAME University, among others. Together with Kai Tuchmann, Anuja was the co-curator of an international workshop series on documentary theatre that featured artists like Boris Nikitin, Rimini Protokoll, Zhao Chuan and Gobsquad. They also designed and facilitated an online course curriculum on Digital Documentary Theatre for the Serendipity Arts Foundation. As visiting faculty at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, she leads practice based pedagogy. She has written on film and performance for Nang Magazine, Art India, Bioscope, Hakara and for an edited volume on Performance Making and the Archive for Routledge.
KAI TUCHMANN works as a dramaturg, director, and academic. His artistic work has examined the afterlife of the Cultural Revolution in present-day China, the effects of urbanization on the population of migrants in Europe and Asia, and the ontological status of embodiment vis-à-vis digital technology. His stagings and dramaturgies were invited, among others, to I Dance Hong Kong, Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival, Zürcher Theaterspektakel, Kunstfest Weimar, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Wuzhen Theatre Festival, Asia Society New York, and OCAT Shenzhen. As a guest professor at Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama, he has also developed, together with Li Yinan, the curriculum for the first Dramaturgy BA program in Asia. He has held research fellowships at The Graduate Center, CUNY (Fulbright) and at the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University. Kai also teaches and lectures on dramaturgy and theatre management at Zurich University of the Arts and Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. In his research he argues for an understanding of Dramaturgy as a practice that expands the possibilities of theatre.
As artistic partners for MEDEP, Anuja and Kai will draw on their backgrounds as performance makers who work with historical archives, technology and media, to create an interactive performance, live and virtual, with young students and urban parents of school going children in India and Germany. The aim is to render academic research accessible to a wider audience and convert it into an experiential, performative experience that blurs the hierarchies between audience and performers. The young adults will learn through doing how scientific evidence becomes a rhetorical unit once mediatized and examine the different protocols that constitute scientific evidence on the one hand and mediatised news on the other. The framework will be reflective of the use of new media technologies of current times, highlighting their potential but also their limitations. The outcome will be presented live and documented on YouTube as well.
Media and Epidemics (MEDEP) 