Staging

The 1984 premiere production (and, judging from a few reviews, the subsequent stagings) was much more solemn.

This, he argues, was in turn especially strongly shaped by imported British theatre traditions, particularly the use of the proscenium arch stage which was radically different from the open staging of precolonial and early colonial India and produced and emphasis on frontality in theatre productions that is now deeply structured into Bollywood films, most notably in their smile-at-the-camera song-and-dance sequences.

Ranging along a continuum of degrees of "realism," each of these tourist sites embraces particular conceptions of animal subjectivity, notions of authenticity, and models of human-animal relationships. Each represents a different relationship to the concept of "situ." The higher the perceived realism quotient for each site, the more difficult it is to detect the staging of the natural.