Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife

Abstract

populations, an ongoing pandemic, the undeniable effects of climate change—overwhelming us with one self-perpetuating question: how do we (re)act? In the aesthetic politics of collective performances under review, this question is answered not through prefigured didactic moralizing, but through a consideration of what interventions a politics of the everyday might equip us with. Generated from and within the texture of everyday life, the fragmentary and gestural idioms of the everyday present us with familiar yet complex modes of, and opportunities for, aesthetic intervention and ethical attention. They thus grant us an alternative, accessible set of tools and inspirations to pursue not an apolitical theatre, but rather a theatre whose ideological stance exceeds the divisiveness of overly simplified and polarized political ideologies. There is no straight line between art and political mobilization, yet there is no denial that how we make informs “what we make, and how we make matters” (147).