HartBeat Ensemble presents The Indian Ensemble’s Thook (spit)

September 10-11, 2014, 7:30PM
Iseman Theater, Yale University, New Haven
Admissions: $25 general, $20 students/seniors

As part of the Festival of Food Security and this summer’s Food Justice campaign, Hartford’s HartBeat Ensemble presents the US premiere of the Indian Ensemble’s Thook (spit), a play in four vignettes. From the Bengal famine of 1943 to the severely under-reported Food Riots of 2008, Thook uses dark comedy, satire and documentary styles to engage the economics of day-to-day life and delve into the psychological distress caused by chronic hunger. The play will be presented in both Hindi and English and will be accompanied by supertitles. Attendees at the Iseman Theater are invited to interact with the members of The Indian Ensemble – including Abhishek Majumdar (director), Sandeep Shikhar (playwright), and Irawati Karnik (playwright/dramaturge) – after the performance.

Originally commissioned by SchauSpielHausHamburg, Thook is a theatrical exposition of motifs related to food security, international trade of food and hunger, and is a multimedia performance woven with strands of text, installation, movement, projections and music. The Indian Ensemble has been researching this subject for a year, interviewing economists, pregnant women, food security analysts, ‘Right To Food’ activists, cooks, chefs, agriculturists and children of different backgrounds to create this work centered on food and trade. The play also draws from research shared by theater companies from Romania, England, Belgium, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa, who are partners in this project.

The Indian Ensemble is a theatre company based in Bangalore. Since its inception in 2009, the company has grown to include various programs under the leadership of Abhishek Majumdar. The company believes that theatre is not only for society, but is a creation by society. Their plays revolve around poignant tales of contemporary society, culture and politics. Traversing across India, the stories developed at The Indian Ensemble are rooted in the realities of the country very rarely seen across Indian theatre.

HartBeat Ensemble, founded in 2001 by Steven Raider-Ginsburg, Julia B. Rosenblatt and Gregory R. Tate (1952-2012), is a Connecticut-based performance company that creates theater drawn from contemporary life. The company uses their own unique play-creation process, which focuses on first-hand accounts and interviews to produce a theater of identity that speaks directly to non-traditional theatergoers. Through Mainstage plays, Education and Presenting programs, HartBeat develops innovative theater works that are accessible beyond the traditional barriers of class, race, geography and gender.