Have you ever arrived at a lecture that turned into a talk show that turned into a sitcom that turned into a musical that turned into a rage room? No? Then you weren’t at Third Space Performance Lab’s To the Academy this past Saturday at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance. Third Space Performance Lab was founded by Assistant Professor of Theatre Shanti Pillai and actor Marc Gomes, an associate professor of theatre and dance performance at Ithaca College. For the past 10 years, the duo has performed many iterations of the show at venues including the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and UC Berkeley, as well as several locations in India.
Pillai and Gomes’ To the Academy presents a critique of academia employing tools from Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” and classical Indian performance traditions “Bharatanatyam” and “Natyashastra.” Kafka’s short story showcases the journey of an ape, Red Peter, who embraces human-like qualities to escape being caged in a zoo. Pillai and Gomes blend the story of Red Peter with Indian concepts of “Lokadharmi” (realism) and “Natyadharmi” (non-realism).
“We performed a very, very early iteration, which was only about 20 minutes long at UCLA, about nine years ago,” Pillai said. “And a colleague in the dance department, Anurima Banerji, said, ‘Hey, have you ever read Kafka’s short story where this ape gives a lecture?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, God, this whole thing is about a lecture, and we’re sort of the ape in it.’ So the Kafka entered that way, and we began weaving this story of apes in different ways.”
The two-actor show begins with a professor, played by Gomes, lecturing about the art of theatre. He uses academic vocabulary in a sing-song voice to develop both a sense of lyrical ambiguity and musical resonance. Throughout the professor’s lecture, he uses Vel, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) meant to help the two characters drive the show forward.
“The whole piece started to shift, particularly in 2025, because the issues changed, the role of higher education changed,” Pillai said. “So some of the observations we were making needed to open themselves up to the way the larger context had changed, and among the many things, the only one I would want to mention is AI.”
Shortly after the introduction of Vel, Pillai enters the stage dancing to a Hindi song, “O Shanti, O Shanti.” She enters as an antithesis to the professor’s rigid Western views on how theatre should be taught. Two opposing philosophies then drive the performance: One supports learning “theatre through theatre,” while the other advocates for a formalized academic discipline for theatre.
With Vel helping the professor turn the stage into a talk show, the two protagonists engage in an intellectual debate about Kafka, feminism, and the role of theatre in today’s world. The talk show interrogates the relationship between Indian and Western theatre, exploring their influence on each other and questioning possible misogynistic undertones in Kafka’s work.
The performance then transforms into a sitcom with the two characters turning into South Asian immigrants speaking with strong, manufactured accents. The scene mimics overly animated depictions of South Asian characters that often appear under the guise of comedy. This juxtaposition of pure comedy and the use of appropriation strikes a dissonant chord between humor and discomfort.
While moving the performance between a lecture, talk show, and sitcom — with regular interruptions from Vel — the piece critiques the exoticization of Indian culture in Western academia. “There are many moments in the piece that some people think I’m drawing on a classical Indian dance vocabulary, but I’m actually not,” Pillai said. “I wanted to play with how that was read in different audiences. People assume certain things come from a culturally other vocabulary, even if they might not.”
Over the course of the performance, Vel strays away from its original purpose, often adding to the humor of the show while presenting an almost eerie form of intelligence. At the show’s climax, Vel goes rogue, causing Pillai to give up and ultimately destroy the machine.
“There’s something in us that inherently locates that machinery as something alien, as some kind of antagonistic force, even though we’re so reliant on them,” Pillai said. “[There’s] something very satisfying about someone whacking a laptop with a baseball bat.”
The performance ends with the extended metaphor of the apes, as two primates discover the globe. “There’s a childlikeness [to the scene],” Gomes said. “We all play other things, and you know that it’s two people wearing these ridiculous ape suits, you know? [And] we know it’s not the globe, but it’s beautiful. It’s just pure play. It’s a pure act of the imagination.”
For the performers, this final scene is an opportunity for them to focus more on themselves as performers and less on the building of the plot. “We now have a vessel in which we can pour ourselves [into] as performers,” Pillai said. “When you’re a maker, it’s difficult to find the time to work on yourself as a performer within the piece. And I think that’s the sort of next phase now.”
