ISLAMABAD: Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, Arnold Komarov Travelling Theatre and Dugdugi presented ‘Home’, a multidisciplinary performance by Pakistani and Swiss artists, at the Pakistan National Council of Arts (PNCA) open air auditorium.

The performance brought together artists Amna Mawaz Khan and Imran Mushter Nafees from Pakistan and Ilja Komarov and Trixa Arnold from Switzerland, who traveled across Pakistan, to bring the performance piece to fruition.

‘Home’ explored the complexity and contradiction of home – a space that resonates with themes such as comfort and conflict, belonging and alienation. While a sheltering home is a universally recognised necessity for human beings, the project about home explored the contradictions within this space as one of restrictions, and even peril. Through the personal, micro gaze, to a political and macro lens, the project examined the intersection of safe space and one abounding with control, abuse or exclusion.

The artists conducted interactive, arts-based, and performative workshops to explore the topic, together with diverse community members of Pakistan, including marginalised groups and “minorities”, activists, artists and researchers, children and other participants from open calls, to collect content to develop and enrich the performance.

The piece brought to the surface how class, gender and ethnic backgrounds shape the understanding of what home can mean – from the physical location, an internal state, or something communal.

Ilja Komarov, the artistic co-director of Freies Musik theater Zürich, works as a composer, musician, dancer and actor.

Ilja added, “We created it from zero and that makes it very exciting!”

The performance brought together distinct media, talking, music, songs, videos and dance – bringing the experience and practice of all four artists to the stage.

Imran Mushter Nafees, a multidisciplinary artist who believes in the power of art for social and political change, and member of the artist collective Dugdugi, said: “It is definitely a very interesting experience when two people from Pakistan and two people from Switzerland, with completely different cultures, different artistic practices, come together, for actually two projects – one that was already prepared in Switzerland and came to tour in Pakistan, which was ‘Shame on You’, consisting of stories of shame collected from different countries, and we performed it in Karachi, Lahore, Hyderabad and Islamabad. This, the other project, Home, is a co-creation project.”

Calling the shared creation hectic, fun and learning, and cross-cultural collaboration a grounding experience, he said: “For Home, we four artists worked together in Pakistan through different participatory interactive processes in different communities – with children, with activists, with artists – in Karachi and Islamabad. It has been a great experience culminating in the showcase today.”

Trixa Arnold currently works for theatres, dance troupes, performance and film as a musician, dramaturg and director, doing her own projects as well as with Marisa Godoy, Kraut production, Corsin Gaudenz, Annas Kollektiv and others. She is also the artistic co-director at Freies Musik theater Zürich.

Trixa said: “About this co-creation, this collaboration, I found it super-exciting, fun and also, very demanding, because we realise that we do have a lot of cultural differences, that we have other viewpoints on what is actually performance, how does theatre work. I find this very, very interesting and I learnt a lot.”

“It is also important to speak of our process; Ilja and I have been working with this method where we collect stories, thoughts, in public space – we let people tell us their stories, they also write to us, and we stage them. We do work on the texts,” she said.

Amna Mawaz Khan, a performance artist, with two decades of training in South Asian dance forms under Indu Mitha, street theatre, meditation, writing and political activism, said: “It was a very interesting, in-depth process for me as it took a lot of research and interaction with different kinds of people, some of whom I would not have otherwise met, for instance orphans or people who live in troubled neighbourhoods.”

She said she also had some beautiful, insightful interactions with artists from across Karachi especially.

“I also found it interesting that we created a piece of interactive theatre as well as experimental theatre and there was space to constantly innovate,” she added.

Published in Dawn, December 1st, 2024