Kolkata's Chaepani presents two cross-cultural plays, Late for Durga and The Winged Man

Chaepani, a city-based theatre group which is known for its interdisciplinary approach to performing arts, through forms like theatre, film, storytelling and visual design, has come up with a unique theatre festival called Tell Tales 2019 — A Cross-Cultural Theatre Festival, which aims to go beyond the cross-lingual translation of plays and craft performative texts out of them.

“Magical Compass is a cross-cultural performance project which is trying to look at intimacies and relationship between two cultures and how they can be used to create a performance. We wanted to explore the meeting of two cultures, as an intimate relationship and see what kind of resonances and dissonances occur when two cultures interact in their everyday, mundane activities,” says Debaroti Chakraborty, assistant professor of performing arts from Presidency University, who has conceptualised the script of Late for Durga, in collaboration with Rosalie Purvis, a PhD scholar of performing & media arts from Cornell University and has also played the lead role of Durga.

Late for Durga and The Winged Man, are collectively called Magical Compass: Intimate Acts of Cultural Crossings, as each of the performances, uses an intimate space performance to create an immersive experience, with the help of sight, sound, smell and visual experience. Although bilingual, the play is largely non-verbal and uses poetry and monologue, along with phases of silence, to narrate a story which is open-ended and will allow the audience to interpret the themes in their own way, after making an experiential journey, from the beginning of Late for Durga to the end of The Winged Man.

Late For Durga dwells on the perception of the eastern culture through the eyes of a westerner, where a foreign woman (played by Rosalie) visits Kolkata and finds the goddess intriguing and relatable in many ways. The rest of the narrative explores her emotional journey but does not make a stereotypical narrative of ‘self’ and ‘othersness’. Instead, it questions the lens of the ‘west’ and leaves the play with an open ending.

Rosalie Purvis, who wrote the script for Late for Durga, conceptualised the play, after experiencing the Durga Puja in Kolkata last year. “In order to come up with a project which involves a westerner’s interpretation of the east, I decided to attend Durga Puja, instead of following a text. That was the first time that I had attended the festival and I wrote the text as an emotional reaction; coming from somebody who doesn’t really know about the festival, but is deeply moved by the experience,” says Rosalie.

“I wrote the entire play in one day, within a couple of hours and I asked the company Chaepani to help me create the project. It was a window through which I was looking at another world,” adds the scholar from Cornell University, who will be performing the role of the foreign woman in the play.

 The Winged Man is a cultural adaptation of Jose Rivera’s play of the same name and has elements of magic realism woven into the script, which is though non-verbal, acts out a spiritual theme, through process-oriented performances which creates situations and allows the actors to respond to them, sometimes with absurd effects.

"The Winged Man, played by Amlan Chaudhuri, is a mythical creature and we don’t know where he comes from. Only that he is close to extinction and a woman who falls in love with him, gives birth to his child to keep his legacy alive," says Debasish Sen Sharma, one of the directors. “I read the play a couple of years back when I went to New York and I had thought of adapting it to the Indian context. It’s a response from an Indian performer to a Latin-American play,” adds Debasish.

“But The Winged Man’s character can also mean a lot of different things. For example, a man who wants to fly high and thinks differently. The rest, you can gauge from the performance itself,” adds Debasish with a smile.

Late For Durga and The Winged Man will be staged at the Padatik on April 3, 7 pm onwards

Picture Courtesy: Ritam Nandy