My book Rehearsing for Life. Theatre for Social Change in Nepal, Cambridge University Press (2018), is available here. If you cannot access any copies please contact me at: monmottin@gmail.com
Rehearsing for life captures the process of production and performance of theatrical activities aiming at bringing about social change in both development and political intervention in Nepal. Starting from Aarohan Theatre Group, a Kathmandu-based professional company, the analysis extends to the Kamlari Natak Samuha, a Tharu grass-roots activist organization in Deukhuri Valley (West Nepal) and to the Maoist cultural troupes moving out of the People’s War into the peace process. I have taken a critical perspective considering theatre as a mode of socio-cultural practice embedded in the wider socio-political reality: the group organizational structures, the artists’ identities and professional aspirations, the performative side of the 2006 street protests, the Nepalization of the global form of Forum Theatre, the wider theatre scenario characterized by a lack of state support that allowed for development aid to become the almost unique source of livelihood for artists indeed affect the ways in which performances are produced. What emerges is an account of what it means to do theatre and live by theatre in contemporary Nepal, the contested moral boundaries between development, art and activism, the tension between theatre as a profession and theatre as activism, the pressures felt by Maoist cultural workers to improve the quality of their productions when performing in the capital and how a group of committed artists managed to transform a stigmatized passion into a respectable and glamourous job. This book is based on my PhD research and subsequent revisits.