Traditionally Speaking

The story goes that an ocean-liner bearing toxic waste, bound for the ship-breaking yard in Alang, made a halt in the port of Chennai some years ago. Green activists in the city were incensed and decided to protest. In a couple of motorized rubber dinghies, they staged a protest alongside the ocean liner. While one group held up empty banners, another group would race by and spray-paint a message of protest on the banners. It was a large operation that was coordinated, precise and well-rehearsed, so much so that the coast guard patrol could not stand by any longer. The leader of the protest group was questioned and pulled-up for trespassing. The activist calmly replied that all they were doing was a traditional act of protest. Upon hearing the word ‘traditional’, the until then belligerent coast guard was swiftly mollified.

A story though it may be, it is an all-too-familiar sentiment that ‘tradition’ must be something good even if we don’t quite get it. Concepts like culture or tradition are often associated with a sense of duty, thereby perpetuating a sense of boredom. Tradition becomes a historical artifact, which, barring possible anthropological interest (where you study it like a lab experiment) becomes officious and boring. So much so, that just the right degree of boringness is a reassuring guarantee of a worthwhile event, given the case of performances. Too much and the audience is driven out of its seats, too little and it may find the theme too disagreeably intense. Mediocre practitioners unfailingly find the perfect mixture.

Terms like ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ are often pitted against each other as polar opposites thereby ensuring that we never arrive at the more important discourse of what distinguishes mediocrity from potential excellence. How much better it would be if we could approach our practice by putting yesterday’s discoveries to the test, ‘ready to believe that the true play has once again escaped us’, (Peter Brook, The Empty Space). How much better if we could resist the trap of being complacent, of being bored, of believing that somewhere, someone has found out the way and it does not have to be questioned any longer. As practitioners and audience members, we are all implicated in the act of creation – an act that requires us to be critical, alert and involved.