Director: Prof. Jane Collins
Group: Department of Theatre Arts, S.N.School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad
Language: Multilingual
Duration: 50 minutes

The performance deals with the basic issues of site-specific performance, rigorously problematizing the viewership while deliberately avoiding spectacle creation. Addressing issues of space and displacement, it refuses to use the site as a mere backdrop for dramatic action, and sees it instead as a facilitator to different ways of seeing. Transforming available spaces through minimal design elements, it allows the audience to look at the building in a different way, exposing underlying issues of ownership, control and migration, related to the people who inhabit it.

In this performance students have tried to perform Romeo-Juliet and make the audience look at it in a particular way. The security guard tries to maintain the institutional norms of viewing while constantly warding off intruding outsiders. The audience is lured to be a part of the performance in many different ways - as guests at a party, as voyeurs, as dispassionate observers called upon to judge the characters, as onlookers, avoiding involvement in violent confrontations - not allowing them to settle with one way of viewing or understanding. In the end, the security guard takes over, opening up the story into a narrative of his own migrant existence on the margins of urban life.