Stroking Dead Man’s Hair: The polemics of Third Theatre and Us!

The Human Rights Defenders held their first play ‘Stroking Dead Man’s Hair’ on the 11th of September, 2007 at the Seagull Bookstore. The play touched upon a variety of human rights violations. The already value-laden date was not a co-incidence but purposely chosen as we wanted to bring to light some lesser known but equally important India centric events connected with September 11th – for example, not many Indians know that on the 11th of September, 1948 the Armed Forces Special Powers Act was enforced in Manipur. Also, since it happened to be W.H.Auden’s centenary year, we decided to incorporate one of his rarer but extremely pertinent poems called 1st September, 1939 into what we called our ‘cross-media triptych’.

The possibility of developing theatre into a medium that the Human Rights Defenders could use to protest and raise awareness was raised by Oishik at our first post-workshop meeting. September was finally narrowed down as a feasible time to hold the one week workshop that was to be conducted by noted theatre-person and activist Parnab Mukherjee.


We finally started the workshop at the Seagull Bookstore on the 7th of September with Parnab introducing us to the concept of Third Theatre– intimate theatre characterized by moulding the space around the play and not vice-versa, as so often is the case. The day was concluded with watching an extremely disturbing video called ‘Manipur Burning’ and with discussing extracts from Tariq Ali’s ‘The Clash of Fundamentalisms’ as well as Agha Ali Khan’s poems.
On the 8th, an afternoon of what was supposed to be poster designing turned into a tug-of-war between a couple of reluctant softwares and some graphically challenged Defenders! In the end victory was ours and we managed a decent enough poster!

The next two days were spent in getting our sequences right; something which we managed to finish in record time since Parnab insisted on only one take to ensure spontaneity! Some of the choreography was pretty violent and in the end all of us had a few bruises or cuts as proof! Later, we were asked to come up with 2 minute narrations on a general theme of violence that were as personal as they were hard hitting. Then came the dreaded part where we were asked to recite our lines from Auden – with a few exceptions, it was a MAJOR disaster! Thus encouraged, we departed for the night!


Monday morning and afternoon was spent in printing and distributing the posters. The Defenders managed to put up posters in places like St. Xavier’s, Loreto House, Jadavpur University, Oxford Bookstore, SRFTI, etc. Towards late afternoon the Defenders met up at the bookstore to begin rehearsals in earnest. Much to our surprise Parnab decided to initiate discussions on theatre, film and human right violations rather than make us do multiple runs. He explained that the debates and discussions were as much a part of the play as the choreography. Also, as mentioned earlier, he did not want to ruin the spontaneity of the play by having multiple run-throughs. As we left the bookstore that night, all of us were unsure about the outcome of the play.

11th September, 2007. D day! We met in the morning and had one run through. Parnab unfortunately came down with a temperature and had to be mattress-ridden for most of the morning. Utter pandemonium broke out as we attempted to come up with last minute transitions between sequences. As the tension mounted the cast went out for lunch to take a break. We soothed our frayed nerves by mock seriously threatening mutiny! By 6 o’ clock, a sizeable crowd had gathered and as they watched a video of Bant Singh, we applied our grease-paint. After the video was over we launched into our sequences while Parnab managed to weave our actions into his narration. The choreography mostly went off without hitches and we ended by playing the extremely disturbing ‘Manipur Burning’ video. The second show also ran smoothly and suddenly, just as abruptly as it had started, the workshop was over.

The feedback was, for the most part, very encouraging. There were a few people who admitted that they didn’t quite grasp the ‘inner meaning’. I guess on some level, neither did we! The fact that we were able to reach out to people in a small way was overwhelming and made the entire exercise worthwhile for the Defenders. We gained a lot from the workshop. Apart from getting a taste of Third Theatre, we were exposed to Parnab’s fiery style of activism. We learnt the value of being organized. We also realized that a motley group of enthusiastic individuals with conflicting time schedules CAN come up with something as constructive as a play in four days. Of course, other indispensable factors include endless cups of chai, lots of food, an extremely patient organization like Seagull and a generous helping of Parnab Mukherjee!