It’s no secret that artistic research takes place at the Academy of Theatre and Dance (ATD), but what does it actually entail? In this interview, part 23 in a series, we take a peek behind the scenes, in conversation with Indian theatre practitioner Agat Sharma, artist in residence at the ATD and as part of the Lectorate research project Climate Imaginaries. 

Part 23: Singing a Land into Being

Agat Sharma: There was a vibrant amateur theatre scene and festival culture in Jaipur, where I grew up. My father worked in a public sector bank and he would often perform in cultural programs organised by the bank. I grew up watching him on stage and I trod the boards for the first time at the age of five. I started performing the scripts which my father had performed, written or directed and by the time I was 15 I discovered Peter Handke – there was no going back after reading Offending the Audience. My conception of theatre changed after encountering that text. And then at some point Waiting for Godot came into my life and still creeps into my work in ways that I can’t fully explain. These were supposedly my early influences. But even before these early influences, ten years of kathak training at school, the Ramlila and folk dance and theatre that was present in the social and cultural life of a rapidly transforming urban context had somehow already seeped into my understanding of what theatre can do. And I am learning to realise that now. 

I studied design in New Delhi and had planned to pursue a professional practice in that field. Having a full time career in theatre in India was beyond my imagination. Experimental theatre in India was a very small niche that overlapped considerably with contemporary performance art. When I started working as a designer, I somehow managed to continue my performance and theatre practice on the side. I started working with the radical street theatre group Jan Natya Manch in 2014. Jan Natya Manch was founded in 1973 and is specialised in left-wing street theatre in Hindi. During my time at Jan Natya Manch, I worked a lot with improvised community theatre. And it was during this time that I got a chance to be part of a collaboration with the Freedom Theatre from Jenin in Palestine. In 2020 I finally gathered the courage and the means to leave my job and commit to full time theatre and I joined DAS Theatre in Amsterdam.     

In January 2025 you worked with the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture on the new project Singing a Land into Being, as part of the Justice by Design Winter School.

Singing a Land into Being is about the cotton crisis in India. Cotton has been grown in India for thousands of years, but ever since the Green Revolution of the 1970s the increasing use of pesticides and fertilisers has led to serious soil pollution. Farmers and their families are suffering from kidney failure and various types of cancer, and many children are born with deformities. On top of that, the farmers are forced to sign strangling contracts and have to buy new seeds every year. Around 400,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995, and the worst-hit communities are the ones involved in the cotton industry.

Singing a Land into Being is part of a long-term research project into the history of cotton cultivation in India. The cotton crop used to be known as ‘white gold’ and my earlier piece White Gold is framed as a restaging of a traditional play from central India. It tells the story of Ruru, Suka and an alien Larynx, and it’s performed on five successive evenings every May, before the June rains that mark the start of the sowing season. Ruru and Suka are two children who undertake an epic journey around the world to heal the land, which has been devastated by the strange Larynx. The focus of my research in Singing a Land into Being is the relationship between body, voice and landscape. The sense of intimacy that farmers once had with the land has been lost.   

How did you approach making Singing a Land into Being with the Academy of Architecture students?

I worked with 12 students. I had a five stanza poem I’d written for an unfinished script. It’s about a train called the Cancer Express – it’s a real train. Every evening it departs from north India, transporting cancer patients to the public hospital 325 kilometres away. It’s an eight-an-a-half hour journey. 

Would you recite some of the poem for me?

It begins, ‘A train knifes through the farms of Punjab. Tongue falls off. Pesticide clouds rain the lungs.  Beloved’s Beds loaned to death. She does not whistle, she moans in pain as she leaves the platform on scheduled time. Cancer eyes look at cancer eyes in the dark cold night. Rhythm of the train the gushes of the wind and the melody of sweet undying pain. Welcome aboard the Cancer Express a real train.’

I cut up the sentences and split the group into three, so we could play around with the words and meanings. We used a lot of repetition and ‘stacking’, and pitch shifts too. Before doing the poem I asked the students to close their eyes and make an empty space in their mind, to make room for a collective imagination; for the landscape we would travel through together. And to keep them connected and really present in a physical way I got the students to feel each other’s pulse. 

What I was looking for was an embodied experience, rather than an ‘outcome’ or an ‘analysis’. The only thing the work asked them to do was this: stay with it... stay with it. By singing together for two hours, the words settled into our bodies, and the word ‘knifes’ ... ‘knifes’ ... ‘knifes’ cut deeper and deeper.

Text and interview:
Hester van Hasselt

The complete series of  interviews Artistic research: New pathways to new knowledge? you can read here