Performers of an Indian concert party at the Royal Ordnance Corps theatre, Baghdad, ca.1917 is a posed group photograph of a troupe of Indian soldiers and non-combatants near Baghdad, in the Mesopotamia theatre. It is possible that this is a photograph taken during a celebration of a religious holiday. Some of the performers, including the female impersonators, have their faces whitened with flour. A note on the reverse of the original photograph states that the performance lasted from 8pm until 3.30am. Musical accompaniment was provided by tom-tom drums and the small box organ seen on the left of the photograph. In Group Photo, this image has been animated to suggest the appearance and disappearance of colour in the faces and costumes of the performers, and also in the painted backdrop that they are pictured against. This is in keeping with the tradition of hand-colouring of photographs that was a very common feature of photographic practice in India at the time. The colours are indicative of the desire for liveliness in a difficult and drab terrain, and the vivid colours in the landscape are suggestive of the aesthetic of the ‘painted backdrop’ that was common both to folk theatre and to popular photography at the time. 

These tropes suggest the ways in which many of the Indian soldiers and ‘followers’ made the conditions of war time ‘bearable’ and lived through very difficult conditions with courage, sensitivity and a sign that they had not forgotten what made life beautiful. This attitude is evident in the letters they wrote home, some of which have also made their way into the audio elements of the work.