Across Continents, Across Stages

Over the past year, I have had the joy and privilege of collaborating with American playwright and theatre scholar Dr Kari Barclay of Oberlin College on a project that has enriched my understanding of dramaturgy, globalisation, and the generative force of international partnerships. What began as a simple search for a collaborator through the Global Liberal Arts Alliance’s Course Connections programme grew into a deeply meaningful scholarly and creative exchange. It took us both to our classrooms, public talks, local theatres, multilingual performance spaces, and eventually into each other’s works as playwrights, translators and interlocutors.

Our project, Dramaturgies of Globalisation, supported by the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Directions in Global Scholarship programme with funding from the Mellon Foundation, allowed us to explore how the movement of people, ideas and artistic traditions across borders shapes contemporary performance practices in India and the United States. What emerged was not only new knowledge but also new friendships, new translations and the beginnings of a co-written play.

Our main idea was to understand how the movement of people and goods across borders has influenced theatre.

Some of the questions that we addressed through our collaborative research were as follows:

• How do playwrights and dramaturgs from diverse ethnic, socio-economic, educational and linguistic backgrounds understand and negotiate their identities as both global and local cultural subjects?

• How do artists sustain their creative lives through making, producing and presenting new theatre work, and how do global economic shifts shape their professional and artistic livelihoods?

• How do theatre practitioners collaborate across cultural differences, and what forms intercultural performance takes in various contemporary contexts?

• How do artists and dramaturgs develop the linguistic and cultural competencies necessary to create meaningful work within diverse and pluralistic societies?

In what ways deterritorialisation and global interconnectedness open up new possibilities for artistic creation and influence the evolution of creative practices?

Learning Across Landscapes

My journey began in Oberlin, where Kari introduced me to the vibrant, multicultural theatre ecology of Northeast Ohio, a region whose cultural life has been profoundly impacted by globalisation. The research questions that anchored the project took on texture and form as we:

• Interviewed Cleveland-based theatre artists about how global migrations and shifting local economies shape their creative and professional lives.

• Visited Cleveland Public Theatre, where multilingual programming supports Spanish and Arabic speaking communities through Teatro Publico de Cleveland and Masrah Cleveland Al Arabi.

• Watched The Outstretched Hand, a production exploring Arab American identity, and reflected on the contrasting perspectives of artists in the Global South and those living in diaspora.

• Walked the vast expanse of Playhouse Square, observing how Broadway’s global circuits of financing, touring and transnational fandoms intersect with local spectatorship.
  

During my time at Oberlin, I spoke to the faculty and students on Dramaturgy in Contemporary India and joined Kari’s playwriting class to share my creative process. The students’ curiosity and reflections still stay with me.

Collaboration on this Shore

When Kari visited Pune, our conversations moved into new terrains: folk traditions, experimental theatres and the intersections of gender, queerness and caste in Indian performance.

Together, we:

• Watched a Dashawatar folk performance from the Konkan region, reflecting on how traditional forms negotiate global modernity.

• Attended Mohit Takalkar’s production of Jennifer Haley’s The Nether at The Box, discussing how American narratives transform in Indian performance contexts.

• I was in conversation with Kari and Sharanya Ramprakash, a theatre director from Bangalore, at the FLAME campus. They shared their creative processes of writing and staging within the broader context of society, gender and contemporary performance practices. While addressing their individual approaches to creating and performing, both situated their practices at the intersection of gender and theatrical traditions. They also discussed how they explore queer politics and asexuality to interrogate stereotypes and power dynamics, viewing theatre as a medium for reimagining identity, desire and storytelling.
  

Kari also delivered multiple talks, including Bodies Between Worlds at Pune University, and participated in my FLAME playwriting class, where their work on race and queer experience offered students a critical lens into United States performance cultures.

Translations, New Writing and Future Directions

One of the most rewarding facets of our collaboration was the exchange of our own creative work:

• I translated Kari’s play Can I Hold You? into Marathi, which was published in the 23rd edition of हाकारा । hākārā, alongside a thoughtful article by Kari.

• He read out an English translation of my play Anandbhog Mall, translated by Aishwarya Walvekar.

• We accumulated notes, fragments and dialogues that grew into a draft of a joint play, tentatively titled How to Escape Home in 15 Minutes.

These translations and our emerging co-written script reflect the heartbeat of our collaboration: crossing languages, crossing idioms and expanding our dramaturgical imaginations by stepping into each other’s creative worlds.

Why This Collaboration Matters

Our collaboration reinforced something we both felt intuitively: that in times marked by division, global partnerships in the arts and humanities are not only enriching but essential. They invite us to see our local contexts differently, to listen to unfamiliar voices and to build solidarities across geography, politics and lived experience.

Collaborations like this remind me why we make theatre and why we study it: to understand the worlds we inhabit and the worlds we make, to imagine differently and to stay connected across borders, both visible and invisible.