Published Paper Details:

Street theatre has always had a prominent role in the socio-political and cultural life of India as a democratic mode of communication, education and political dissent. Street theatre was one of the most powerful means of communication that came to the fore through the efforts of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) and later, organisations like the Jana Natya Manch (JANAM) which made the street a place for discourse, protest, and social mobilisation. Traditional studies has always perceived street theatre in terms of the reliance on public space like streets, markets, factory gates, university campuses, and village squares. But, changes in technology, digital media and the need for hybrid communication platforms, as well as the rapid urbanisation, and the private sale of public spaces, have drastically transformed the spatial and social landscape of public performance in modern India. The article suggests that the street has become a new historical form in Indian street theatre and that it isn't only a geographical location but rather a subject, networked and dynamic space of public engagement. The paper suggests the term Post-Public Performance as a conceptual lens for analysing the shift of politically engaged performance from traditional public streets to hybrid physical and digital environments such as shopping malls, metro stations, social media, universities and live streaming platforms. In this paper, I draw on the field of Performance Studies, public sphere theory, spatial theory and the field of contemporary cultural studies to show how the democratic performance is taking place in connected, physical, digital and mediated publics. These changes are not the demise of street theatre but its adaptation to the changing social realities. The proposed framework helps to rethink the concept of publicness in contemporary theatre studies, by rendering it as a performative process rather than a specific place.