Book Launch: Documentary Theatre in India: Assembling Publics; Performing Politics

KAI TUCHMANN AND ANUJA GHOSALKAR

Kai Tuchmann (Berlin) and Anuja Ghosalkar (Bangalore) are theatre directors and curators who have significantly advanced Documentary Theatre through practice, pedagogy, and scholarship. Their collaboration began with Starting Realities (2018–2019), India’s first international workshop series on Documentary Theatre featuring artists like Gobsquad Collective, Boris Nikitin, and Rimini Protokoll. They co-curated Connecting Realities at the Serendipity Arts Festival (2019), fostering dialogue on Documentary Theatre across Asia, and later introduced Look, Here is Your Machine, Get In!—a VR-based performance for Serendipity Arts Virtual (2020), followed by experimental video works at the Brecht Festival in Augsburg (2022). As artists-in-residence at Srishti Manipal Institute, they led a practice-based Interim Semester (2025) and designed an online curriculum on Digital Documentary Theatre for Serendipity Arts Foundation (2022). Their global engagement includes lectures and workshops at Harvard’s Meta Lab, Hong Kong University, Basel’s It’s The Real Thing, Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the National School of Drama. Their scholarship culminated in the co-edited volume Documentary Theatre in India: Assembling Publics, Performing Politics (Transcript, Germany), reinforcing their commitment to interdisciplinary practice and knowledge-sharing.

SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

Soumyabrata Choudhury is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has previously taught at CSSSC, Kolkata, and has been a fellow at CSDS, Delhi and IIAS, Shimla. He has authored Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth, Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme, and numerous articles on ancient Greek liturgy, the staging of Ibsen, psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, Schiller, and Hegel. His latest book is Now It’s Come To Distances: Notes on Coronavirus and Shaheen Bagh, Association and Isolation. He has also directed, scripted, and acted in several plays.

TRINA NILEENA BANERJEE

Trina Nileena Banerjee is Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She holds degrees from Jadavpur University and the University of Oxford and completed her PhD on women in Bengal’s group theatre movement (1950–1980). Her research spans gender, performance, political theatre, theories of the body, and South Asian history, including long-term work on women’s protest movements and political theatre in Manipur. She previously taught at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Banerjee writes in Bengali and English, has published widely in national and international journals, and has also worked as a theatre and film actor, journalist, and fiction writer.