I first saw the play Nirbhaya in 2013 during its premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. At the time, it was already receiving critical attention as an incredibly urgent play about life as a woman in India. It was difficult and complex viewing—beautiful in its artistic direction and devastating in its content. Now, two years later, Nirbhaya has toured much of the world—New York City, London, Dublin and Delhi—before arriving in Vancouver and, currently, Toronto for a 12-day showing presented by the feminist-run Nightwood Theatre at the Harbourfront Centre.
Nirbhaya is written and directed by South African playwright Yaël Farber in collaboration with her Indian cast, and tackles an especially arduous subject, sexual- and gender-based violence, in telling the story of Jyoti Singh Pandey, called “Fearless One” after her brutal gang rape on a bus in Delhi in 2012. She fought for her life in hospital for 12 days before succumbing to her injuries, and, as a result, became an international news story and symbol of India’s failure to rid itself of gender inequality and injustice. Rather than simply dramatizing this horrific event, Nirbhaya uses it to shine a light on the cast’s own stories: five actresses who have themselves experienced gender-based violence. The result is a fusion of contemporary theatre, performance art and social activism.
Many of the stories were deeply distressing to hear and see played out: marital rape, child abuse, attempted murder. Pamela Sinha’s story of her rape by a home invader in Montreal reminds us that rape is not culturally bound, but rather a global pandemic. While each story had its own acting and staging style, it was the visibly scarred Sneha Jawale’s story of the moment her husband doused her in kerosene, set her alight and stole her toddler son, told plainly through tears and in Hindi, that was easily the most impactful.
One must acknowledge the safety of the theatre and its suspended disbelief here. Without it, many of these stories would be too difficult to bear; perhaps they would go unheard. And so by making reality into drama, the play is able to tackle these issues through enactment and prolonged confrontation in a way that a performance in a street or gallery space could not. Spatial separation between performer and spectator is what classically differentiates performance art from theatre. While Nirbhaya attempts to blur such distinctions by initially placing the cast among the audience, it risks becoming debilitatingly upsetting, and the play soon retreats behind the fourth wall. Contemporary performance artist Marina Abramovic has at times been deeply critical of theatre, saying, “In theatre you can cut with a knife and there is blood. The knife is not real, the blood is not real. In performance, the blood and the knife and the body of the performer are real.” If realness is the measure by which we determine the emotional impact of a performance, then there was certainly blood on the knife of Nirbhaya’s story, and a cut that went very deep.
Fictional storytelling can enact a social response that documentary cannot—when faced with unbearable truths, unvarnished, we often turn away, or become angered by accusations of culpability. In Nirbhaya, we inhabit the real through a kind of make-believe. Drama loves the figurative, using it to establish broader social ideas, reflected in the play by the image of Jyoti becoming Nirbhaya. During the show a performer questions, “Who knows why one woman’s fate changed so many lives?” As proven by the impact on European asylum policy of the recent photograph of three-year-old war refugee Aylan Kurdi, who drowned and was washed ashore in the Mediterranean, iconic, archetypal images hold great power.
Yet they are also ethically tricky, for they can interpret personal, distressing stories broadly, as entertainment. There is the potential for the audience to feel manipulated by the bluntness and veracity of stories, especially when observed from satin theatre seats and when augmented with a soundscape and lighting. The staging of Nirbhaya, however, is stripped bare, making use of minimal set design. There are just some chairs to represent a bus, hanging window frames, and fabric and cloth that symbolize bodies, weapons and other motifs. It engages the other senses: the scent of burning incense; the sound of water poured over bodies, or of ash falling on a trail from a hanging container. There is an aestheticization of suffering here, but it unsettles just enough to make palpable what otherwise might be painful viewing. While art that asks its audience to be consumers of others’ pain or atrocity can feel gratuitous, Nirbhaya stresses the consent of the storytellers, who own their narratives. In this way, the production largely sidesteps the accusations of exploitation that are often fired at social-activist art.
Contemporary art tends to shy away from didacticism, something that Nirbhaya is pointedly unafraid of—and not to its detriment. While its point may be very clear, the reaction it elicits is more ambiguous, with the audience seemingly left wondering what it can offer other than tears and sympathy. A post-show reception with the actors present provides a place for the audience to digest and share their own stories. Can art and social activism work in conjunction to abet the fight against abuse? In India, a country infamous for dowry beatings, child marriages, caste structures and female illiteracy, social activism is already leading the fight for equality of the sexes. The pink-sari-wearing women’s group Gulabi Gang, first started in 2006 by former child bride Sampat Pal Devi to publically shame and punish oppressive and abusive men, now has members running in the hundreds of thousands. In the intersection of politics and resistance, the arts may be the last safe space for experimentation and play. Artist collective Blank Noise make use of relational aesthetics in their performance piece Talk to Me, in which they set up a table in Delhi’s infamous “rape lane” and offer samosas and chai, with an aim to begin conversations across genders and spark empathy between people of different backgrounds. It is cultural intervention implementing storytelling and listening, one that seems parallel to Nirbhaya.
Throughout the play, women refer to the Delhi rape case as the moment they determined that enough was enough. Reflecting on that day in December 2012, one actress asserts, “I know my silence all these years is part of what that dark night brought.” If Nirbhaya has one message, it is the importance of bearing witness. In a world that still questions women who come forward about rape, sharing stories is one action that might alter the narrative. Bringing to light high-profile cases helps, but there is also power in activist performance: in the tension between fiction and “the real,” between artistry and didacticism and exploitation. Nirbhaya treads this line carefully, but triumphs, resulting in one of the most important and timely pieces of performance art in the past few years.
