Theatre Across Borders

<p><i>Is there a fundamental connection between New York's Elevator Repair Service's 9-hour production of </i>The Great Gatsby <i>and a Kathakali performance?</i> <p/><i>How can we come to appreciate the slowness of Kabuki theatre as much as the pace of the Whatsapp theatre of post-Arab Spring Turkey? <p/></i><i>Can we go beyond our own culture's contemporary definition of a 'good play' and think about the theatre in a deep and pluralistic manner?</i> <p/>Drawing on his extensive experience working with theatre artists students and thinkers across the globe - up to and including an hour-long audience with the Dalai Lama - playwright Abhishek Majumdar considers why we make theatre and how we see it in different parts of the world. <p/>His own work has taken him from theatre in Japan to dance companies in the Phillippines writers in Lebanon and Palestine theatre groups in Burkina Faso war-torn areas like Kashmir and North Eastern India and to China and Tibet Argentina and Mexico. <p/>Via a far-reaching and provocative collection of essays that is informed by this wealth of experience Majumdar explores: <br>- how different cultures conceive theatre and how the norm of one place is the experiment of another;<br>- the ways in which theatre across the world mirrors its socio political and philosophical climate;<br>- how for thousands of years theatre has been a tool to both disrupt and to heal;<br>- and how even within the many differences there are universals from which we can all learn and how theatre does cross borders <p/>Of interest to theatre makers everywhere - be they writers actors directors or designers - this book offers an oversight as well as interrogation into the place of theatre in the world today.</p>