Solo performances, especially autobiographical solo performances, are a rich variety of contemporary performance art and are remarkable for its simple, low cost and immensely personalized ventures. Brought up as a communist in United States, Josh’s major performance preoccupations are the interrelationships between politics and spirituality and ordinary human beings intervention into political activism. “Citizen Josh” is also no exemption to this. But Josh attempted heavily to transform his work in accordance with the ‘Indian situation’. After finalizing his Indian tour, Josh jotted down in is blog: “I’ve daydreamed fairly constantly about how I’m going to make this brilliant revision of Citizen Josh for India. Citizen Josh is about democracy — or, more specifically, one rather passive person’s serendipitous journey into political activism. But that story, like all my pieces, is part of a larger narrative: my quest, as the child of communists, to find a way to my own set of beliefs. Where I think I sit ideologically, at 50, is in the camp of the small-”d” democrats. But where do I sit spiritually? My upbringing was, in retrospect, as spiritual as it was political: We believed in a classless, Utopian future, and there was in our rituals a kind of ecstatic faith in both the correctness of our beliefs and the inevitability of our predictions. So I begin my re-approach to Citizen Josh, circling warily around my own story, seeking a vector that will connect me both with my dear audiences in India and with myself.” Josh’s work is remarkable for its attempt to explore the dimensions which politics and spirituality share. The work shop on 18 the august would introduce his subjectivised performance practices to Indian theatre practitioners.
http://www.joshkornbluth.com
