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Amitesh Grover

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Amitesh Grover (born 1980) is an Indian theatre director and Professor of theatre direction at the National School of Drama. He is known for his experimental theatre, performances, and installations.[1] In 2008, Sangeet Natak Akademi awarded him Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for his contribution to the field of theatre direction.[2] He has been described as “one of the leading theatre makers in India” by The Charles Wallace India Trust and his work has been described as one that “transcends the boundaries of conventional theatre” by The Week.[3][4]

Amitesh Grover
Born1980
New Delhi, India
NationalityIndian
Alma materUniversity of the Arts London
Known forTheatre & Performance
Notable workThe Money Opera, The Last Poet, Velocity Pieces
StyleExperimental
SpouseSarah Mariam
AwardsUstad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar ,[1]
Websitehttps://amiteshgrover.com

Early life and education

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Born in New Delhi, he completed his schooling from Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and his graduation at Delhi University. He earned a scholarship to study at National School of Drama, New Delhi in 2001, where he completed M.A. (Diploma) in Theatre Direction.[5] In 2005, he received the Charles Wallace Scholarship to study in London, where he completed M.A. in Theatre and Performance from the University of the Arts London.[6]

Work

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Grover is known for his innovative work in the field of theatre and performance. His work first attracted attention for integrating digital technology in live performances.[7] In 2007, he directed Falk Richter's play Electronic City in which live camera feed, TV-sets and projections were used along with actors on stage.[8] Other theatre presentations of his include Memorable Equinox (2007), Hamlet Quartet (2009), and Strange Lines (2010), in which motion tracking, real-time video feed and multimedia were integral elements of the performances.[9][10] Ever since, his hybrid creations have gained a growing dedicated audience in India.[11]

He gained acclaim for his “real-life” performances. Moving away from conventional theatre, Grover created participatory performances that brought real life and real people into the theatre. Social Gaming (2010–12) was an event Grover created in collaboration with British artist Alex Fleetwood, which connected audiences in different countries in real time through a series of social tasks and games.[12][13] The Sleep Concert (2013–14) was a one-week long performance event of collective sleeping energies curated by Grover and his collaborators Frank Oberhausser and Shaunak Sen. Held over the course of several nights in multiple locations in New Delhi and Berlin, the audience was lulled into sleep with a set of carefully curated performances, participatory acts, and live-improvisations. The show was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica award in Austria in 2016.[14][15]

In Songs of Mourning (2013–16), Grover worked with a professional traditional Oppari mourner to stage an unscripted interview about the rituals and processes of expressing grief in India. The show travelled to various festivals in India and Europe.[16][17][18] Extending real-life performances into his own life, he created Back To Work (2016–17) in which he went undercover in a technology company to work as an IT professional for a duration of six months. During his employment, in addition to his job he produced performances, CCTV-art, and a film.[19] The art-works produced in this series was shown in an exhibition tilted ‘Hangar for the Passerby’ curated by Akansha Rastogi and commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.[20][21][22]

His 2018 play Raag Darbari, based on the satirical Hindi novel by Shrilal Shukla illustrating the failing values in post-Independence Indian society, is seen as a return to story-telling and conventional theatre in his career.[23] His show Table Radica (2019-ongoing), which followed soon after, presents the personal strife and the public triumph of an artist working in such a society. The show, directed and performed by Grover himself, used archival and edible elements to focus on the life of the popular Indian playwright and director Habib Tanvir.[24][25]

In the pandemic years, when theatres were shut down in India, Grover turned to the digital space to create his work.[26] In 2020, he created The Last Poet, a cyber-play that centres around a missing poet in a dystopian society, making references to the political threats that writers and artists encounter. The show took place on the web, in which the audience were taken into a 3-D virtual city and provided with options to choose different spaces, called rooms, in which they watched live performances. The show was described as “India’s first theatre-for-the-internet” by India Art Review. The Indian Express called it “a bold new work,” The Telegraph stated that the show is "an eternal refuge for wrecked souls," and Mumbai Theatre Guide described it as "bold, intense, and thought-provoking." The show premiered at SA Virtual Festival and was later shown at the Tata Literature Live Festival 2021. It was the official entry at IMPACT 21 Festival held at MT Space for Performing Arts, Canada and the Segal Festival of Theatre & Film, USA.[27][28][29][30][31][32]

Grover is also known for conceptual art and installations. In Wounding (2021) — for which he received the MASH FICA award for New Media Artist — Grover transformed a family archive of pictures into a narrative about the 1947 Partition. The images experienced visual glitches when individual stories were added to the ASCII representations of the scanned images, presenting “brilliant hues of intentionally glitched, wounded photographs.” [33][34][35] As a special commission for the third edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale, Grover created a series of imageless photographs drawn entirely from his imagination and memory titled All That We Saw. This work was shown as part of the digital showcase running across 2021—22 on the biennale platform as well as galleries and exhibitions across India.[36][37]

In a public art installation titled Velocity Pieces (2019—ongoing), Grover used billboard as a medium to express ideas of protest and dissent through action-poems. A large billboard is erected on Kasturba Gandhi Marg in central Delhi, where Grover’s board-poems can be read till date. The Art Newspaper called it “a new way of understanding India’s modern and contemporary art” and the billboard got nominated as one of 250 most important artworks of modern India in the book, "Moving Focus, India: New Perspectives on Modern and Contemporary Art" edited by Mortimer Chaterjee and published by ACC Art Books, USA & Canada. [38][39][40]

His most recent theatre production is The Money Opera. Set in an abandoned building, it is a collection of multiple stories performed by actors and real-life professionals that presents a layered critique of capitalism. Described as “the 3-hour-long magnum opus” by The Outlook and "theatre that defies convention" by The Hindu, the show premiered in Goa at the Serendipity Arts Festival in 2022 and travelled to New Delhi in 2023.[41][42][43][44][45][46]

Grover's work has been shown at the National Theatre (London), MT Space (Canada), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Segal Center Festival on Theatre and Performance (USA), Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art, Arts Centre Melbourne, TATA Literature Festival Mumbai, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Bharat Rang Mahotsav, Cornell University, Prithvi Theatre Festival, Serendipity Arts Festival.[47][48][49] He has been selected for artist residencies at PACT Zollverein (Germany), Tokyo Culture Creation Project (Japan), and Berliner Theatertreffen. He has been commissioned by the Chennai Photo Biennale and by Australia's Sydney-based 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.[50]

He was the Artistic Director for International Theatre Festival of Kerala for 2020 and 2021 and the Ranga Shankara Festival, Bangalore in 2021.[51][52] He has given artist talks at Lasalle College of the Arts (Singapore), Asian Performing Arts Market (Australia) and Hong Kong University.[53][54][55]

Awards

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Nominations

Publications

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  • Performance Making and the Archive, Ed. Ashutosh Potdar & Sharmistha Saha, ISBN 9780367195601, Routledge India, 2022 [62]
  • Pandemic of Perspectives, Ed. Rimple Mehta, Sandali Thakur, Debaroti Chakraborty, ISBN 9781003320524, Routledge India [63]
  • Postdramatic Theatre and India, Ed. Ashis Sengupta, ISBN 9781350154094, Bloomsbury Publishing [64]
  • Why Curate Live Arts? TURBA, The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation, Ed. Dena Davida, ISSN 2693-0129, Berghahn Journals, New York & Berlin [65]
  • ISSUE, Ed. Venka Purushothaman, ISSN 2315-4802, LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore [66]
  • Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance, Ed. Ranjana Dave, ISBN 978-81-945348-2-2, Tullika Books [67]
  • Hakara, Ed. Ashutosh Potdar, ISSN 2581-9976 [68]
  • Imaginable Worlds: Art, Crisis, and Global Futures, Ed. Orianna Cacchione, Nandita Jaishankar, and Arushi Vats, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago [69]
  • Moving Focus: New Perspectives on Modern & Contemporary Art, Ed. Mortimer Chaterjee, ISBN 9781788841733, ACC Art Books, USA & Canada
  • The Indian Express - A Voice, Under 35: The Murder of A Scene [70]

References

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  1. ^ a b Nath, Parshathy J. (2020-01-16). "I make the audience complicit in my art: Amitesh Grover". The Hindu. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 2024-01-31.
  2. ^ "English Releases". pib.gov.in. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  3. ^ "Amitesh's story". Charles Wallace India Trust. 2020-10-20. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  4. ^ "All the web's a stage". The Week. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  5. ^ https://nsd.gov.in/delhi/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/NSD-GRADUATES1.pdf
  6. ^ Ananthakrishnan, B.; Collins, Jane (2019-05-04). "Against a hierarchy of expressive means; arguments for new pedagogies in performer education in India and the UK". Studies in Theatre and Performance. 39 (2): 113–131. doi:10.1080/14682761.2018.1429758. ISSN 1468-2761.
  7. ^ "Meet the brave new digital theatre". Hindustan Times. 2014-03-19. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  8. ^ Razdan, Arjun (2007-09-22). "The future is here". mint. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  9. ^ "Comic Capers". The Indian Express. 2010-01-04. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  10. ^ "Prithvi's all decked up for its annual theatre festival". Hindustan Times. 2009-10-27. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  11. ^ admin (2022-01-18). "When art is not restricted by medium: Exploring the oeuvre of interdisciplinary artist Amitesh Grover". Abirpothi. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  12. ^ "The Show Begins". The Indian Express. 2011-01-07. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  13. ^ "The Bridge Player". The Indian Express. 2011-09-05. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  14. ^ Sengupta, Ashis (2022-01-27). Postdramatic Theatre and India: Theatre-Making Since the 1990s. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-350-15410-0.
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  16. ^ "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now". The Indian Express. 2016-07-31. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  17. ^ swissinfo.ch, <Anand Chandrasekhar> (2016-07-21). "The sleep of the grateful dead". SWI swissinfo.ch. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  18. ^ PTI (2015-02-10). "Art of grieving". www.millenniumpost.in. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  19. ^ "I into You into Me". www.telegraphindia.com. Retrieved 2023-12-02.
  20. ^ "Exploring relationships between geographies, biographies and forgotten histories". Architectural Digest India. 2017-04-21. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  21. ^ Singh, Adwait (2019-11-19). "A Model for Invisible Growth". Take Art Magazine. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  22. ^ OpenArt (2017-05-13). "Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is pleased to present Hangar for the Passerby". OpenArt India. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  23. ^ "Vikas Has Missed the Bus". The Indian Express. 2018-11-18. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  24. ^ Banerjee, Kaushani (2019-05-20). "Table Radica: A unique recreation of Habib Tanvir's radical life on stage and beyond". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  25. ^ "Table Talk: A feast for the senses". Hindustan Times. 2019-05-25. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  26. ^ "Creative selection: Creative isolation worked wonders for some, led to huge loss of creativity in others". Financialexpress. 2021-05-02. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  27. ^ "The Last Poet cyber theatre directed by Amitesh Grover". The Telegraph.
  28. ^ "A digital festival that responds to the times". Mint (newspaper). 4 December 2020.
  29. ^ "The Last Poet: A Dystopian Journey from Amitesh Grover - India Art Review". 2021-10-26. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  30. ^ "'The actors ask questions and the audience decides what they want to see': Atul Kumar". Moneycontrol. 2021-09-24. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  31. ^ "Interview With Amitesh Grover Interview : www.MumbaiTheatreGuide.com". MumbaiTheatreGuide.com. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  32. ^ "All the web's a stage". The Week. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  33. ^ "WOUNDING by Amitesh Grover". The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  34. ^ "Narrating the Body in/as Data: WOUNDING, an Episode by Amitesh Grover". asapconnect.in. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  35. ^ adminhakara (2021-11-17). "Between Memory and History: Annalisa Mansukhani". Hakara. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  36. ^ "Amitesh Grover's 'imageless photographs' occupy the crowded frame of text and memory". News9live. 2022-02-20. Retrieved 2024-03-07.
  37. ^ world, STIR. "Empty frames of 'All That We Saw' by Amitesh Grover stimulate viewer's memory". www.stirworld.com. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  38. ^ "An artist nudges Delhi with verses on a billboard". Mintlounge. 2021-11-09. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  39. ^ "All the world a stage: Artist urges protest through KG Marg billboard in Delhi". The Indian Express. 2020-02-22. Retrieved 2024-03-07.
  40. ^ "Moving Focus, India". ACC Art Books US. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  41. ^ "The Immersive Theatre Experience Of Amitesh Grover's 'Money Opera'". Outlook India. 11 March 2023. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  42. ^ "In an abandoned building in Goa, Amitesh Grover creates a layered piece on capitalism, titled The Money Opera". The Indian Express. 2022-12-21. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  43. ^ Chawla, Noor Anand (2023-09-30). "The Money Opera: A new immersive theatrical production offers much to think about". The Sunday Guardian Live. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  44. ^ Mankatalia, Dhriti (2023-09-29). "A layered tale about money". The Hindu. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  45. ^ Vasanthan, Sobhika (2023-09-25). "Watch A Groundbreaking Theatrical Exploration Of Greed, Morality, & Desire". Homegrown. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  46. ^ Khan, Mohd Shehwaaz (2023-09-21). "The Money Opera comes to Delhi with new characters". The Patriot. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  47. ^ "In an abandoned building in Goa, Amitesh Grover creates a layered piece on capitalism, titled The Money Opera". The Indian Express. 21 December 2022.
  48. ^ "As cultural festivals go digital, organisers aim for global reach, hybrid online-offline presence in future". Firstpost. 2020-12-10. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  49. ^ "Bonsai Gone Wild". Open The Magazine. 2017-05-31. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  50. ^ "China Daily Lifestyle Premium". China Daily Lifestyle Premium. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  51. ^ "Celebrating Otherness". The Indian Express. 2020-01-21.
  52. ^ "Ranga Shankara theatre festival opens on Oct 27". Deccan Herald. 2021-10-19.
  53. ^ "ANCER Conference 2020: Disruption as Opportunity". Ancer Network. 2020-12-14. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  54. ^ csgchku (2023-06-20). "How to do things with words when publishing on performance?". CSGC. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  55. ^ "Amitesh Grover". Australian Performing Arts Market. Retrieved 2024-03-11.
  56. ^ "English Releases". pib.gov.in. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  57. ^ "Mash FICA New Media Grant". The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  58. ^ "South Asian artists awarded residencies". Pro Helvetia New Delhi. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  59. ^ "Amitesh's story". Charles Wallace India Trust. 2020-10-20.
  60. ^ "ARTE LAGUNA PRIZE 12th Edition by Arte Laguna Prize - Issuu". issuu.com. 2018-03-22. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  61. ^ "A Project By Amitesh Grover – Forecast". 2015-08-10. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  62. ^ "Performance Making and the Archive". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  63. ^ "Pandemic of Perspectives: Creative Re-imaginings". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  64. ^ bloomsbury.com. "Postdramatic Theatre and India". Bloomsbury. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  65. ^ Grover, Amitesh (2022-03-01). "There Will Be Trouble: Curating Theater in India". TURBA. 1 (1): 95–102. doi:10.3167/turba.2022.010109. ISSN 2693-0137. S2CID 245806425.
  66. ^ "Search results for issue11 - The Ngee Ann Kongsi Library Institutional Repository". drlib.lasalle.edu.sg. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  67. ^ Dave, Ranjana, ed. (February 2022). Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance, No. 2. Tulika Books. ISBN 978-81-945348-2-2.
  68. ^ "Directing Raag Darbari: Amitesh Grover". Hakara. 2018-12-23. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  69. ^ Cacchione, Orianna; Jaishankar, Nandita; Vats, Arushi; Banerjee, Trina Nileena; Bernaus, Leticia; Nyen, Ho Tzu; Iweala, Uzodinma; Jagoda, Patrick; Kandasamy, Meena (eds.). Imaginable Worlds: Art, Crisis, and Global Futures. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago.
  70. ^ "A voice, under 35: The murder of a scene". The Indian Express. 2016-02-22. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
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