Orality as Dramaturgy in the Khasi-Welsh Performance Exchange: Performing Journeys by the Khasi-Cymru Collective

This article, written in two voices, one Khasi, one Welsh, revisits the process of devising Performing Journeys, a theatre production that toured India and Wales in 2019–20. It approaches the practical methodology for making work, reached between Khasi and Welsh practitioners, as a dramaturgy of orality. The performance explored the historic relationship between the Welsh and the Khasi peoples that is rooted in the presence of the Welsh mission in North East India. As such, it brought together the Khasi oral tradition and archival information pertaining to the interaction between the Welsh and the Khasi peoples, a contact that is rooted in the cataclysmic introduction of literacy to a culture that was hitherto entirely oral. The article explores the significance of oral performance for making theatre between two cultures currently exploring the implications of their intercultural entanglements in relation to contemporary postcolonial identities.