Description:
Resisting both Orientalist and post-colonial readings in its universalizing message, Satyagraha enacts the historical story of Gandhi's early activist years in South Africa through a ritualized form of staged drama. Deliberately misaligning stage action and its untranslated Sanskrit libretto text, this intercultural work that we call a 'para-opera' aims to counter the musical and dramatic expectations of Western operatic audiences. Similarly, in its oblique relationship to both imperial India and to actual colonialism in South Africa, it can be called para-colonial: nearby, related, alongside the colonial. As para-colonial para-opera, however, it speaks movingly across political and generic boundaries - not despite or against them.