Indian director Sankar Venkateswaran presented Criminal Tribes Act at last year’s TCT’19, cutting through the discriminatory structures lurking within individual and social unconscious. Through another co-production this year with Theater Commons Tokyo and Kyoto University of Art and Design’s Kyoto Performing Arts Center, Venkateswaran presents his latest work based on the Indian rope trick, a legend that has continued to capture people’s imaginations.
In societies where different ethnic and class groups coexist, majority forces use myths and narratives as tools of domination. When these stories are told repeatedly, they can become commonly held “truths.” We see ourselves accepting these narratives, including deception, propaganda, and fake news. The reality that people willingly believe stories as facts serves as a basis for building social structures. Led by Venkateswaran’s perspective that questions the construction of nationalist and ethnic- nationalist identities, the audience may encounter mystical shadows nestled deep within their interiority.

What is the Indian rope trick?
A magician brings a boy assistant to a square where people gather. As the magician performs his trick, the rope rises high into the sky. The boy climbs up the rope and disappears, seemingly forever. Then the magician follows suit, climbing up the rope and vanishing. The audience suddenly hears the boy scream, then watch his fragmented body parts fall from the sky. The magician climbs back down the rope. He casts a spell onto the body parts that revive the boy uninjured. The trick is recorded in several documents including a travel account by a fourteenth century Moroccan explorer. Various versions of this story exist. Many Indian magicians attempted to perform it in the nineteenth century.