‘Think differently, get creative’: producing precarity in India’s corporate theater culture industry

ABSTRACT

In India’s rapidly developing global cities, large multinational corporations implement theater-based corporate training programs that are designed to inspire employees to be more dynamic, aspirational, and self-motivated at work. Offering a performance ethnography of a week-long Theatre in Excellence program hosted in Bangalore (2014), I suggest that the theater-based corporate training process is a site where the emergent Indian neoliberal laboring subject is being talked about, experimented with, and actively shaped. These practices illuminate how within India, a previously colonized nation undergoing rapid economic restructuring, theater and performance techniques are used to both interrogate and reproduce employee precarity within neoliberal capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• theater-based corporate training
• neoliberalism
• labor
• workplace culture

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jenny Hughes, Margaret Werry, Suvadip Sinha, Michael Goldman, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this piece. My thanks also go to faculty and graduate students who listened to early versions at the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, the South Asia Studies Colloquium at UMN, and the Social Theory Colloquium at Yale University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sarah Saddler is a doctorate candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her research examines intersections of performance and neoliberalism in urban India, where she focuses on the implementation of theater-based corporate training practices in India’s largest cities. This project stems from her experience facilitating, observing, and participating in performance training events since 2012. Her past work on playwright August Wilson can be found in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on Plays (2016).

Notes

1. Names of employees, trainers, and corporate personnel have not been identified or have been given pseudonyms in order to maintain anonymity.

2. Madgulkar, Mohan. Head of Steps Drama: India. Interview by author. Bangalore, July 2014.

3. Indian theater scholars and activists have spoken out against the appropriation of political theater methodologies within India and abroad. See for example Sudhanva Deshpande’s introduction to Theatre of the Streets: The Jana Natya Manch Experience (Deshpande and Ghosh 2007).

4. http://www.greatplacetowork.in/our-approach/what-is-a-great-workplace [Accessed September 6, 2016]. Emphasis original.

5. See “What is a Great Workplace?” - greatplacetowork.in [Accessed September 6, 2016]

6. While forum theater typically requires that the spect-actor physically assume the role of the protagonist, most of the training companies and individuals I interviewed do not have participants physically intervene in the scene. This is often because trainers feel that giving participants agency to take the scene in whichever direction they choose would risk jeopardizing the training’s ability to achieve set learning objectives and outcomes.

7. See Roy (2007) and Jaffrelot (1996) for a discussion of the role of ethno-nationalist movements in the formation of the Indian postcolonial nation-state.