Amitesh Grover
Born1980
NationalityIndian
Alma materUniversity of the Arts London
Known forTheatre & Inter-disciplinary Art
Notable workThe Money Opera, The Last Poet, Velocity Pieces
StyleExperimental
SpouseSarah Mariam
AwardsMASH FICA New Media Award, Ustad Bismillah Khan National Award for Direction, Charles Wallace Award, Prohelvetia Residency Award, Forecast Award Germany, Arte Laguna Prize Italy
Websitehttps://amiteshgrover.com

Amitesh Grover is an Indian theatre director and artist. He has conceptualised and directed several plays, many of which have been experimental in nature. He is the recipient of MASH FICA Award, Swiss Residency Award For South Asian Artists, Bismillah Khan National Award For Theatre Direction, Charles Wallace Award (U.K.) and was nominated for Arte Laguna Prize (Italy), Prix Ars Electronica Award (Austria) and Forecast Award (Germany). He also creates inter-disciplinary art, curates performance, and is a published writer. He is currently Associate Professor at National School of Drama.

Education

Grover completed his schooling from Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and his graduation at Delhi University. He is an alumnus of National School of Drama (India) and holds a post-graduate degree (M.A. in Performance) from University of the Arts London.

Career

Grover's work is multi-disciplinary and experimental in nature. He is one of India's leading theatre makers.[1] His work spans theatre, text projects, installation, digital art, and performance. Within the sphere of theatre, Grover is seen as an exponent and experimenter of the melding of digital tools within the structure of traditional performances.[2] His 2007 performance of Falk Richter’s play Electronic City — for which he was awarded the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for theatre direction — used multimedia and video projection alongside performances by actors.[3] Even in his other early theatre presentations, such as Memorable Equinox (2007), Strange Lines (2010), and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2009) motion tracking, live video feed, and multimedia were an integral element of the performances.[4] He has also adapted and directed a play based on Raag Darbari (2018), a landmark Hindi novel by Shrilal Shukla.

As an artist, Grover has focused on performance art and installation, often in collaboration with other creators and artists. Among his works is On Sleep (2013–14), a performance which was held in New Delhi and Berlin simultaneously.[5] In each city, members of the audience were invited to participate in different activities centred around sleep, such as a ‘sleep walk’ through Old Delhi, which focused on understanding the challenge of finding a place to sleep faced by the city’s homeless population. On Mourning, an interview-performance staged from 2013 to 2016, included a conversation with a professional mourner and examined the rituals and processes of exhibiting grief in India.[6] Another example of participatory art conceptualised by Grover is Social Gaming (2009–12), an event he created in collaboration with the British artist Alex Fleetwood.[7] Participants in seven countries — Australia, England, India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the United States — were invited to play and interact with each other through a series of tasks. In his durational performance series Back To Work (2016-17), he got employed in one of India's largest IT companies for a period of six months and produced art-actions as part of his job to comment on digital labour in South Asia.[8]

A significant aspect of Grover’s artistic practice is a layer of commentary, political and social, seen in theatre, installation art and performance presentations. The Last Poet with its central idea of a missing poet in a dystopian society, referenced the political threats faced by writers and artists.[9][10] With a software platform exclusively created for it, this cyber-play opened with a short film, after which the audience was given the option of choosing different spaces, called rooms, in which to continue watching live performances.[11][12][13] In Wounding (2019), Grover turned a family archive of images into a history of the 1947 Partition, inserting stories of individuals between the ASCII representations of the scanned images, resulting in visual glitches in the images.[14] Where Velocity Pieces (2019–23) utilises the billboard as a medium of expressing ideas of protest and dissent, the performance piece Table Radica (2019–ongoing) utilises archival and gastronomical elements to present the life and ideas of Habib Tanvir, one of India’s most celebrated playwrights.[15][16][17] His most notable recent work is The Money Opera (2022–ongoing).[18][19] Set in an abandoned building, it is a collection of multiple stories performed by actors and non-actors that presents a layered critique of Capitalism.[20][21][22]

He has shown his work at National Theatre London,[23] Arts Centre Melbourne,[24] MT Space (Canada),[25] HKW Berlin (Germany),[26] Segal Center Festival on Theatre and Performance (USA),[27] Belluard Bollwerk International (Switzerland),[28] Cornell University (USA),[29] Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art,[30] Kiran Nadar Museum of Art,[31] Shrine Empire Gallery,[32] VAICA Video Art Festival,[33] TATA Literature Festival,[34] Bharat Rang Mahotsav,[35] Prithvi Theatre Festival,[36] Serendipity Arts Festival.[37] He was an artist resident at PACT Zollverein (Germany), Tokyo Culture Creation Project (Japan),[38] and Berliner Theatertreffen.[39] His work has been commissioned by the Chennai Photo Biennale[40][41] and by Australia's Sydney-based 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.[42]

He was the Artistic Director for International Theatre Festival of Kerala (2020-21),[43] Ranga Shankara Festival, Bangalore (2021),[44] and Nove Writers’ Festival, Prague (2019). He has given artist talks at Lasalle College of the Arts,[45] APAM (Australia), Bochum University (Germany), Hong Kong University.[46]

He is Associate Professor at the National School of Drama (India),[47] and a visiting faculty at National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad), Shiv Nadar University (U.P.), and Tisch School of the Arts (NYU).[48]

List of works

Year Works Kind Premier Show
2007 Memorable Equinox New Media Theatre CWIT Award Ceremony, U.K. / India
2008 Electronic City New Media Theatre Goethe-Institut Performance Grant Award, India
2008 I Speak You Interactive Digital Installation Rote Fabrik Studios, Switzerland
2008 I Hate My Body Performance & Installation Khoj Live Art Festival, India
2009 Hamlet Quartet Theatre SNA National Theatre Festival, India
2009 Strange Lines New Media Theatre BRM International Theatre Festival of India
2011 Social Gaming Participatory Inter-continental Games National Theatre London, U.K.
2012 Tenderness Theatre National School of Drama, India
2012 Crowd Sourced Condo Participatory Digital Acts Hartell Gallery, Cornell University, USA
2012 Gnomonicity Interactive Digital Installation Devi Art Foundation, India
2013 Talk Concert Participatory Theatre Mannheim Theatre Festival, Germany
2013 Sleep Concert Participatory Theatre Heimathafen Berlin, Germany
2014 Lament Concert Theatre Festival Belluard Bollwerk International, Switzerland
2015 Body Double Social Media Theatre Duetsche Theatre Berlin, Germany
2016 Hyperlinked Junkie Speech Acts Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India
2017 Back To Work Durational Performance, Surveillance Art, Installation, Film Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India
2018 Raag Darbari Theatre National School of Drama
2019 Table Radica Food Theatre Oddbird Theatre, New Delhi
2019 Velocity Pieces Billboard Art Goethe-Institut, India
2020 The Last Poet Cyber Theatre Serendipity Digital Arts Festival, India
2020 Wounding Glitch Art / Data Art Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art
2021 All That We Saw Text-based Installation Chennai Photo Biennale
2022 A Doll's House Theatre National School of Drama
2022 The Money Opera Theatre in an abandoned building Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India

Awards

Selected publications

  • Performance Making and the Archive,[55] Ed. Ashutosh Potdar & Sharmistha Saha, ISBN 9780367195601, Routledge India, 2022
  • Pandemic of Perspectives,[56] Ed. Rimple Mehta, Sandali Thakur, Debaroti Chakraborty, ISBN 9781003320524, Routledge India
  • Postdramatic Theatre and India,[57] Ed. Ashis Sengupta, ISBN 9781350154094, Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Why Curate Live Arts? TURBA,[58] The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation, Ed. Dena Davida, ISSN 2693-0129, Berghahn Journals, New York & Berlin
  • ISSUE,[59] Ed. Venka Purushothaman, ISSN 2315-4802, LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore
  • Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance,[60] Ed. Ranjana Dave, ISBN 978-81-945348-2-2, Tullika Books
  • Hakara,[61] Ed. Ashutosh Potdar, ISSN 2581-9976
  • Imaginable Worlds: Art, Crisis, and Global Futures,[62] Ed. Orianna Cacchione, Nandita Jaishankar, and Arushi Vats, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
  • A Voice, Under 35: The Murder of A Scene: The Indian Express[63]

References

  1. ↑ "Amitesh's story". Charles Wallace India Trust. 2020-10-20. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  2. ↑ "Meet the brave new digital theatre". Hindustan Times. 2014-03-19. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  3. ↑ Razdan, Arjun (2007-09-22). "The future is here". mint. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  4. ↑ "Comic Capers". The Indian Express. 2010-01-04. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  5. ↑ "Close Your Eyes". The Indian Express. 2014-11-24. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  6. ↑ swissinfo.ch, <Anand Chandrasekhar> (2016-07-21). "The sleep of the grateful dead". SWI swissinfo.ch. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  7. ↑ "The Bridge Player". The Indian Express. 2011-09-05. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  8. ↑ "I into You into Me". www.telegraphindia.com. Retrieved 2023-12-02.
  9. ↑ "All the web's a stage". The Week. Retrieved 2023-12-02.
  10. ↑ "A digital festival that responds to the times". Mint (newspaper). 4 December 2020.
  11. ↑ "The Last Poet cyber theatre directed by Amitesh Grover". The Telegraph.
  12. ↑ "The Last Poet". www.platform-mag.com. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  13. ↑ "The Last Poet: A Dystopian Journey from Amitesh Grover - India Art Review". 2021-10-26. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  14. ↑ "Narrating the Body in/as Data: WOUNDING, an Episode by Amitesh Grover". asapconnect.in. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  15. ↑ "An artist nudges Delhi with verses on a billboard". Mintlounge. 2021-11-09. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  16. ↑ "All the world a stage: Artist urges protest through KG Marg billboard in Delhi". The Indian Express. 2020-02-22. Retrieved 2023-07-21.
  17. ↑ "Table Radica: A unique recreation of Habib Tanvir's radical life on stage and beyond". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  18. ↑ "The Immersive Theatre Experience Of Amitesh Grover's The Money Opera".
  19. ↑ "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 2023-11-30.
  20. ↑ 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.
  21. ↑ "New Theatre: Audience-Powered Storytelling!". Curious Times. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  22. ↑ Vasanthan, Sobhika (2023-09-25). "Watch A Groundbreaking Theatrical Exploration Of Greed, Morality, & Desire". Homegrown. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  23. ↑ "The Bridge Player". The Indian Express. 2011-09-05. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  24. ↑ "Amitesh Grover". Australian Performing Arts Market. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  25. ↑ "IMPACT 21 - The Last Poet". MT Space. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  26. ↑ "A Project By Amitesh Grover – Forecast". 2015-08-10. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  27. ↑ "The Last Poet by Amitesh Grover". Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2022. 8 February 2022.
  28. ↑ "The sleep of the grateful dead". Swissinfo. 2016-07-21.
  29. ↑ "STEPHANIE OWENS » curatorial". Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  30. ↑ "WOUNDING by Amitesh Grover". The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  31. ↑ "Bonsai Gone Wild". Open The Magazine. 31 May 2017.
  32. ↑ "Shrine Empire Gallery » Amitesh Grover". Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  33. ↑ "VAICA Video Art Festival Artists". 2019-10-04. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  34. ↑ "As cultural festivals go digital, organisers aim for global reach, hybrid online-offline presence in future". Firstpost. 10 December 2020.
  35. ↑ General, The Delhi Walla · in (2007-11-18). "Special Report – New Stars in Delhi Theater". The Delhi Walla. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  36. ↑ "Prithvi's all decked up for its annual theatre festival". Hindustan Times. 27 October 2009.
  37. ↑ "In an abandoned building in Goa, Amitesh Grover creates a layered piece on capitalism, titled The Money Opera". The Indian Express. 21 December 2022.
  38. ↑ "International Visitors Program". www.artscouncil-tokyo.jp.
  39. ↑ "Theatertreffen 2013 - Broschüre by Berliner Festspiele - Issuu". issuu.com. 2013-04-26. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  40. ↑ "Amitesh Grover's 'imageless photographs' occupy the crowded frame of text and memory". News9live. 20 February 2022.
  41. ↑ world, STIR. "Empty frames of 'All That We Saw' by Amitesh Grover stimulate viewer's memory". www.stirworld.com. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
  42. ↑ "China Daily Lifestyle Premium". China Daily Lifestyle Premium. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  43. ↑ "Celebrating Otherness". The Indian Express. 2020-01-21.
  44. ↑ "Ranga Shankara theatre festival opens on Oct 27". Deccan Herald. 2021-10-19.
  45. ↑ "ANCER Conference 2020: Disruption as Opportunity". Ancer Network. 2020-12-14. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  46. ↑ csgchku (2023-06-20). "How to do things with words when publishing on performance?". CSGC. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  47. ↑ "Faculty Members". National School of Drama.
  48. ↑ "All the web's a stage". The Week.
  49. ↑ "Mash FICA New Media Grant". The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  50. ↑ "South Asian artists awarded residencies". Pro Helvetia New Delhi. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  51. ↑ "English Releases". pib.gov.in. Retrieved 2023-11-30.
  52. ↑ "Amitesh's story". Charles Wallace India Trust. 2020-10-20.
  53. ↑ "ARTE LAGUNA PRIZE 12th Edition by Arte Laguna Prize - Issuu". issuu.com. 2018-03-22. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  54. ↑ "A Project By Amitesh Grover – Forecast". 2015-08-10. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  55. ↑ "Performance Making and the Archive". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  56. ↑ "Pandemic of Perspectives: Creative Re-imaginings". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  57. ↑ bloomsbury.com. "Postdramatic Theatre and India". Bloomsbury. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  58. ↑ 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.
  59. ↑ "Search results for issue11 - The Ngee Ann Kongsi Library Institutional Repository". drlib.lasalle.edu.sg. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  60. ↑ Dave, Ranjana, ed. (February 2022). Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance, No. 2. Tulika Books. ISBN 978-81-945348-2-2.
  61. ↑ "Directing Raag Darbari: Amitesh Grover". Hakara. 2018-12-23. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  62. ↑ 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.
  63. ↑ "A voice, under 35: The murder of a scene". The Indian Express. 2016-02-22. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.