Workshop to separate fake news from real

Anuja Ghosalkar teaches documentary theatre, a genre she is developing.

With social media creating fake ‘facts’ and disrupting objective reality, artistes are now faced with the challenge of countering it.

Documentary theatre is a form that uses pre-existing documentary material such as newspapers, interviews, journals, and correspondences as source material for stories, without any alteration in performance.

Anuja Ghosalkar

Instructor Anuja Ghosalkar, director of ‘Lady Anandi’, a documentary theatre performance which sparked a lot of contradictions, says people did not welcome the form initially. “Breaking the norms and presenting something new was not acceptable back then,” she says. Anuja is practising documentary theatre since 2014. She has been conducting various workshops and performances based on it across the country.

Speaking to Metrolife, Anuja comments on the growth of documentary theatre and its significance in the present day world.

She says, “Documentary theatre has no fictional characters; it involves real people talking about their life stories. It is different from conventional theatre”.

She also intends to organise more workshops in the coming days. She shares, “Since it is the year of general elections, we are aiming to come up with workshops that allow people to share their stories. There is no hiding behind characters here”. Anuja is currently curating a workshop on ‘Fiction’ and ‘Falseness’ and how documentary theatre can deal with it, which will be organised next week.

What to expect?

The workshop investigates the relationship of truth, fiction and falseness.

It looks at answering questions like ‘can social media and self-publishing challenge the working routines and methods of a free and independent press?’, ‘is the press a privileged source?’, ‘what is the impact of these challenges on classical documentary theatre?’, ‘how can one uphold one’s own agency while dealing with truth claims associated with?’. The workshop will also explore the fine line between documentary truth and fiction. The participants will also critically examine the promises of authenticity that go along with the theatre’s utilisation of documents.

Three-day event

The workshop is open to all. Interested can send a mail to [e-mail] to register.

- Registration fee: Rs 1,500

- Venue: Goethe Institute, Max Mueller Bhavan

- When: January 25, 26 and 27.