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| The evening was just setting in, it was 24th January, the day 2 of KIPAF 16. As we settled down at Company Bagan Park, Mohamad Haryo Hutomo and Sakinah Alatas began moving around and distributing heart-shaped red balloons and slowly unfolding a large yellow cloth. The work unfolded as an abstract, joyous celebration. Sakinah and Haryo, slowly opened up the cloth and stared a moving circle. Haryo went deep in, and Sakinah stayed at the edge, continuously opening up the cloth and expanding the yellow. The large Sunday evening crowd came in to create a large participatory circle of celebration, and the circle kept on growing and moving faster. Yellow and specks of red became the dominant colours. |
Performing Otherwise: Ethical Orientations After Empire
There is no outside to the empire. Not even for art. Especially not for performance art staged in postcolonial public space, where ethics cannot be a matter of polite principles or institutional codes, but a volatile, situated practice. This essay unfolds from that claim.
Performance in India does not operate in a vacuum. It contends with caste hierarchies, colonial residues, land dispossession, digital surveillance, and the seductions of cultural diplomacy. When performance takes place in the street, or in an abandoned factory, or on the roof of a home in North Kolkata, it carries the trace of other violences. The question is not what performance can “do.” The question is how to practise it without reproducing the very structures it may seek to critique.
This essay emerges from the ongoing, unresolved experience of co-curating and co-building the Kolkata International Performance Art Festival (KIPAF), an informal and anti-institutional initiative that has never claimed to represent anyone or anything. It resists spectacularisation. It refuses the smooth grammar of “visibility” or “community engagement.” It mistrusts coherence. As such, KIPAF becomes a pressure point for theorising performance ethics—not through abstraction but from the immediacy of encounter, rupture, and responsibility.
What follows is not a moral blueprint. It is a set of provocations. Ten ethical orientations—not to be ticked off, but to be lived with, argued over, and interrupted. These are drawn not from universalised principles but from the material textures of postcolonial performance: the ungovernable street, the unpaid artist, the watching stranger, the failure that doesn’t resolve.
1. The Ethics of Situation: Sites Are Not Blank
In postcolonial contexts, place is never innocent. Every site bears scars of land grab, gentrification, colonial zoning, and caste policing. Edward Casey writes that places are “active participants in lived experience” rather than passive settings (Casey, 1996)¹. To perform in such a site is not to occupy space—it is to risk activating what it remembers. There is no clean slate. Ethical performance, then, begins with spatial listening: an attentiveness to sedimented memory, unspoken violence, and infrastructural inequality.
2. The Ethics of Invitation: Participation Without Coercion
Participation is a seductive discourse. It claims inclusivity. But too often it enacts coercion. The invitation to participate, particularly in performance, can disguise deeper asymmetries—around legibility, language, safety. Claire Bishop critiques the instrumentalism of participatory art, where “ethical” participation frequently replaces aesthetic rigour, without confronting structural power (Bishop, 2012)². In a KIPAF performance, the ethics lie not in how many joined in, but whether refusal was possible. Could the audience walk away? Could they not be implicated?
3. The Ethics of Relation: Beyond Solidarity as Default
There is a tendency in performance collectives to collapse differences into solidarity. But collaboration across caste, class, language, or region is never neutral. Spivak’s warning remains: to “give voice” is often to overwrite (Spivak, 1988)³. Trinh T. Minh-ha offers an alternative—“speaking nearby” rather than “speaking for” (Trinh, 1989)⁴. KIPAF does not erase the friction between urban and rural artists, between English-educated and vernacular-trained practitioners. It lets those frictions persist. That, too, is ethics.
4. The Ethics of the Archive: Refusing Capture
We are living in a compulsive documentation culture. Smartphones are ubiquitous. Everything must be streamed, posted, and filed. But performance resists this. Its ephemerality is not a flaw—it is a refusal. Diana Taylor distinguishes between the archive (repeatable, institutional) and the repertoire (embodied, ephemeral) (Taylor, 2003)⁵. KIPAF’s resistance to archival control is not romanticism. It is an ethic of opacity. Not everything must be recorded. Not everyone should be captured. Sometimes, the most ethical act is to let the performance disappear.
5. The Ethics of Language: Provincialising English
Theory arrives in English. Even when the body speaks Bangla, Hindi, or silence. This is not incidental. It reflects the colonial afterlife of academic legitimacy. Dipesh Chakrabarty calls for the “provincialisation of Europe,” not to discard theory, but to denaturalise its dominance (Chakrabarty, 2000)⁶. In India, performance theory often circulates in English for funding, curation, and critique. But what gets lost in this translation? What violence is committed in the demand for legibility? KIPAF resists translation. Its ethics lie in preserving what cannot be made fluent.
6. The Ethics of Failure: Valuing the Incomplete
Performance fails. Weather interrupts. The audience doesn’t get it. The performer freezes. Good. Peggy Phelan argues that performance’s disappearance is precisely what gives it political potential—what cannot be fully commodified, cannot be fully controlled (Phelan, 1993)⁷. Failure is not lack—it is a mode of resistance. In a world obsessed with outcomes, deliverables, and reports, ethical performance embraces failure not as a breakdown but as a method.
7. The Ethics of Desire: Tracing the Work’s Longing
Art is not neutral. It is driven by desire—to provoke, to heal, to belong, to be seen. But that desire is never pure. It is shaped by caste, gender, and global aspiration. Spinoza’s notion of conatus—the striving to persist in being—helps us reframe desire not as deficit, but as force (Spinoza, 1994/1677)⁸. Ethical performance practice must interrogate this force. What does the work want? Whose need is being fulfilled? KIPAF does not mask its desires. But it asks them hard questions.
8. The Ethics of Reparation: After the Applause
Performance ends. But its effects linger in the body, in the space, in the psyche of those implicated. Levinas insists that responsibility is infinite—it does not conclude with the act but begins in its aftermath (Levinas, 1969)⁹. Ethical practice demands we return to the site. That we check in. That we clean up. That we do the work of repair. At KIPAF, follow-up is not administration. It is an obligation.
9. The Ethics of the Self: No Outside Observer
Artists are not outside the structures they critique. The fantasy of outsiderhood is seductive, especially for upper-caste, English-speaking, urban practitioners. But ethical performance demands self-implication. Michel Foucault defines ethics as a “practice of freedom,” a constant reworking of the self in relation to others (Foucault, 1984)¹⁰. In India, this means questioning one’s own caste location, one’s access to space, one’s fluency. Ethics is not about being right. It is about being accountable.
10. Ethics as Rhythm: Not a Rule, but a Pulse
There is no final ethical stance. No code that guarantees goodness. Ethics is not a checkbox. It is a rhythm. As Levinas writes, ethics is the very structure of subjectivity (Levinas, 1969)¹¹. For KIPAF, ethics is not something we “apply.” It is something we rehearse, break, and recompose. It is what keeps the work unfinished—and alive.
Conclusion: Against Ethical Branding
Today, ethics has become branding. Institutions boast of “inclusive programming.” Festivals curate under the banner of “care.” But care is not always soft. It is sometimes a refusal. Sometimes confrontation. Sometimes silence.
The ethical orientations proposed here are not gentle. They are rigorous, inconvenient, and often unmarketable. They emerge not from the academy but from practice—muddy, improvisatory, unfinished. For a postcolonial performance ecology like KIPAF, this is the only kind of ethics that matters: one that does not promise resolution, but stays with the trouble.
This essay is not a celebration of performance. It is a call to responsibility. Not the kind that wins awards, but the kind that haunts you.
And maybe that’s the point.
Endnotes
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Casey, E. (1996). How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: Phenomenological prolegomena. In S. Feld & K. Basso (Eds.), Senses of Place (pp. 13–52). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
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Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.
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Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
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Trinh, T. Minh-ha. (1989). Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Taylor, D. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.
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Spinoza, B. (1994). Ethics (E. Curley, Trans.). London: Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1677)
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Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
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Foucault, M. (1984). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 340–372). New York: Pantheon Books.
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Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Written by Rahul Bhattacharya. This text emerges from years of entanglement with KIPAF—not as an observer, but as one of its organisers, witnesses, and co-conspirators. It is not written from above the practice, but inside its mess. These notes on ethics are not prescriptive; they are a way of staying accountable to the bodies, sites, and silences that shaped the work. The questions remain unfinished, as they should.
