Beyond Borders: In the Land of the Naga, Where Theater Does Not Exist
Nestled along India’s northeastern border, Nagaland is a rugged region steeped in ancient cultural traditions. It is here that Instabili Vaganti brought the Beyond Borders project, aiming to blend local dances and songs with Western forms of performance.
Through Beyond Borders, the project explores a cultural intersection that reaches beyond mere geographical boundaries. Instabili Vaganti embraces the artistic heritage of the Naga people, seeking to create a bridge between their unique expressions and Western theatrical traditions. In a place where traditional theater does not exist in the Western sense of the word, the project fosters a space for cultural exchange and mutual inspiration.
by Nicola Pianzola
It’s the final walk through the dirt paths and stone stairways of Jotsoma as the sun dips below the horizon, casting the mountain ridges, blanketed in virgin forest, in a red glow. It’s time to depart, and as the first evening fires ignite, a touch of melancholy overcomes me—I already know how much I’ll miss this place that seems like a remnant of a lost past. I take one final breath, as if to absorb the essence of this corner of the world, mostly unknown to others, with its bucolic vistas, primal scents, and songs.
I head home, knowing that I’ll return soon.
After all, this visit was itself a return—a return to Nagaland, the land of the Naga, a people organized into seventeen different tribes that have always inhabited these mountainous lands in Northeast India.
This region first came to us by chance during one of the initial stages of our international project, Beyond Borders, in December 2021, when we were invited to lead the first theater workshop in the area for the renowned Hornbill Festival.
Known also as the “land of festivals,” Nagaland hosts a range of activities by groups in each tribe dedicated to preserving and showcasing their cultural traditions. There are rhythmic dance performances, singing, and rituals tied to harvest, hunting, war, and rites of passage or social status. The Hornbill is simply the largest of these cultural and folkloric events.
Nagaland is very different from the rest of India. The challenging access to this area has preserved many of its traditions, rituals, and tribal practices, including that of the headhunters, where tribe members proudly displayed the heads of defeated enemies at village entrances, affixing their scalps to their spears and wearing necklaces signifying the number of skulls taken from opponents. Only with the arrival of the British and, subsequently, the introduction of Christianity were some practices banned and gradually abandoned. Today, most of Nagaland’s population is Christian, primarily Baptist, with each clan having its own parish. This expalins why the bustling capital of this country, Kohima, is dotted with churches with their bell towers rising over homes perched on mountainsides.
With Tafma in Art and Dance
Fascinated by the richness and origins of this culture, intrigued by the scarcity of information, documentation, and literature about it, and inspired by the dedication of the participants in our first workshop, we decided to organize a longer period of research and co-creation. This led to the collaboration with Tafma, the Task Force of Music and Arts founded by the Nagaland government to promote Naga culture, and our project partner.
With Tafma, we first selected the Naga artists who would join us for seven intense days of research, technique exchange, and intercultural exploration on the artistic and performance level. We focused on a small group to facilitate genuine exchange and also so that we could welcome these Naga artists to the next phase in Italy, as we had done in 2022 when we invited the Tetseo Sisters—four singing sisters and stars of Naga traditional music—to our PerformAzioni Festival. This time we selected Mengu Suokhrie, a well-known singer with a strong inclination for research and musical fusion; Ethel Wangha, a young dancer; and Akehoto Yepto, a young choreographer combining traditional and contemporary dance.
Each participant belongs to a different tribe and thus holds a unique traditional background. Our team, led by director Anna Dora Dorno, the project’s creator, also included young choreographer Maria Stella Zangirolami. The goal of this stage was to immerse ourselves in Naga culture, to explore its roots and evolution, and to engage it in dialogue with contemporary artistic experimentation. Each morning, as the rooster morning song, we would climb the steep stone steps to Rcempa, the Regional Centre for Excellence in Music and Performing Arts, where Tafma is based and where we worked with our international group of artists. We began with rhythmic and vocal training to establish common ground, allowing tribal steps from different Naga dances to emerge gradually. The traditional dances are group-oriented, often performed hand in hand, and maintain a circular flow, as they evolved around a bonfire. We were immediately captivated by the war dance of the Konyak tribe—the warriors of Nagaland, to which Ethel belongs. This dance is performed exclusively by men, as shown to us by Akehoto.
What caught our attention was the use of voice, accompanying many of the steps and culminating in a final cry. This soon became an element we integrated into our work, leading us to create a highly physical sequence where performers alternated between martial, rhythmic steps of this dance and running or jumping, as though challenging a boundary.
The Meaning of a Song
The Butterfly dance, which imitates a butterfly’s flight, also quickly became a shared element, inspiring a partnered dance with a singing accompaniment. This song was striking in its richness of nuance, as Naga songs accompany many dances and actions, varying by context and setting. They are often paired with the tati, one of the most common traditional stringed instruments. We were in awe listening to a musician we interviewed for the documentary of this experience; his harmonics resonated from his skull and synchronized with the sound of his one-stringed instrument.
“When I sing in the mountains, I use a different voice than when I sing while working in the fields, or calling out to see if someone is in the dense woods on the other side of the hill,” he told us. This is precisely the function of Naga songs—concrete actions, as are their dances.
“Dance is an action,” confided the leader of a folkloric group from the Angami tribe, who we also interviewed. When we asked Mengu about the meaning of a song, she often explained that its structure didn’t have set words but sounds that changed or a word without a direct meaning, born out of binary sounds accompanying a movement, gesture, or action. Immersed in such performance richness, the days flew by, with studio sessions paired with trips to rural villages to learn more about Naga customs. In these evocative settings—large circular stone-paved areas with stone seating where community members gather—we staged performances in contact with natural elements, incorporating stones and long bamboo poles, which became part of an evolving performance structure. This is why we chose the small stone amphitheater outside the auditorium as our final, public venue—a space that recreates the “expanding circle,” as philosopher Enrico Piergiacomi, who has accompanied Beyond Borders since its inception with theoretical-philosophical context, would say. That circle brings us back around the primordial fire, the fulcrum of meeting and sharing among the different tribes.
When Theater Creates “Eutopia”
The audience entered the circular seating area, greeted by the performers’ song as they stood facing huge stone boulders marking the circular space. It was one of the first theatrical performances for the audience, while music and dance are well-developed in Nagaland, theater is underrepresented having no dedicated venues. This also took us back to the origins, and in that small amphitheater, where traditional steps blended with contemporary dance movements and new texts wove together a dramaturgy of movements, actions, songs, and music.
A space for “theater” emerged as a “good place” for the expression of different cultures, traditions, ideas, and emotions. For a brief moment, our “eutopia” was realized.
Participants left deeply enriched by this experience, as though discovering that there is a way to carry their traditional performance heritage and identity into the contemporary world and daily life. Not all Naga artists manage to make this shift and bring their cultural wealth into their artistic practice. Ethel admitted that, as a dancer, she spends most of her time creating short videos for TikTok or Instagram, following the trends of K-pop culture, which seems more prevalent in Nagaland than Indian culture. Akehoto likewise choreographs for dance battles between crews. There is thus a strong influence of contemporary culture that risks erasing or lessen this cultural treasure. To act as a promoter of Naga identity, as Mengu is doing through her music projects, and to represent it in international projects like this is one of the strategies we identified with Tafma to preserve and showcase Naga culture even in Italy.
The night has fallen, and I return to the guesthouse, where a lit fireplace adorned with small and real monkey skulls welcomes me. I lay on the mattress, as hard as the wooden planks we saw in rural villages where inhabitants slept communally.
In my mind, I review the experiences of these days, treasuring the intense work moments, the people I met, all of whom were incredibly kind and generous, and the rhythms and sounds that now feel like my own. I am already thinking of future stages and my next return to Nagaland, one of the most remote places we have reached with our theater. After all, that’s the essence of Beyond Borders—to push art beyond boundaries. ★