Aesthetics of European Experimental Theatre and Bharata’s Nātyaśāstra

Abstract

            Experimental theatre is a general term for various movements in European Drama  beginning with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays in the late nineteenth century, movements that were modes of rejection of the dominant ways of writing and producing plays. It is used more or less interchangeably with the term avant-garde theatre, which literally means threshold literature, an attempt at something new. It altered the audience’s mode of reception by introducing a marked use of language and innovative use of body positions and stances and established thereby a more active relationship with the audience. Physically, theatre spaces took on different shapes, and practitioners re-explored different ways of staging the performance. The given conventions of space, movement, mood, situational tension, language and symbolism stand altered. I have taken four key statements of experimental theatre for the study - Bertolt Brecht’s “A Short Organum for the Theatre”, Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double,  Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre.