Imagining O, Encountering India: Recounting an embodied experience

In February 2012, Richard Schechner’s performance-installation Imagining O travelled from its original place of creation in Canterbury (UK) to the International Theatre Festival of Kerala in Thrissur (India). Imagining O is an immersive and participatory experience that brings together voices of Shakespeare’s women and Pauline Reage’s classic French erotic novel The Story of O. This performance report explores the encounter of a primarily European company with the bodies/gazes of an Indian audience, and their role as spectators in shaping the living organism of the performance. Taking a dialogic structure, it exists in the space between two authors’ voices and experiences — Roanna Mitchell as movement director, Dr Pablo Pakula as performer – mirroring the production’s decentred nature and its refusal of an objective standpoint.