In 2014, in association with the Gujral Foundation, Outset India supported The Transparent Performer III: Some stage directions for [24 Jor Bagh]1/x by Zuleikha Chaudhari. The site-specific installation and performance explored the relationship between the performer and the spectator.
The artist used scenography to examine how a space behaves, to explore the interference of construction, material and form, in a given space, empty or filled. Due to its theatrical nature, the interference was ephemeral and transient, bound in a specific time and place that gives up functionality in favour of the speculative act.
Zuleikha Chaudhari's scenographies are performative environments that are designed not in the sense of being built but of being edited – selected, framed, determined and curated places, series of spaces, points of perspective, ways of looking and routes that provide points of view, frames of vision and vantage points to look from. But this looking is not merely a detached visual activity for the spectator. The looking happens with the whole body. It is choreography. It is a sensorial experience, not unlike that of a performer who engages with his own physicality, space and time in the process of reconstructing himself or constructing an event.
Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer based out of New Delhi. In her work she explores the relationship between the text and the performer, between the performer and space, and the role of the spectator in the performative experience. She describes her works as 'an exploration of space and the role that space plays in the construction and experience of narratives – whether it is the space of the human body, or the space of the place within which the performance is happening.'
Important works include Propositions: On Text and Space II, based on Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Vorher/Nachher, commissioned by the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai and New Delhi in 2011; On Seeing (2008), Khoj Studios; Arabian Night (2006/2007); Siddhartha (2005/2006); and The Mahabharata Project (2003) which was realised for the Prague Quadrenniale.
