May 9, 11,12, 13, 2010
PARABLE OF THE LOST POST OFFICE:
a Poetry with Prakriti festival outreach: a tribute on the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of
Rabindranath Tagore and 100 years of Dakghar
with PARABLE OF THE POST OFFICE:
A SALON THEATRE-INSTALLATION EXPLORATION

Principal Text: Rabindranath Tagore
Additional Text: Aga Shahid Ali and Dhumketu
Directed and designed by Parnab Mukherjee
Video: Someetharan
Installation: Gautam Bajoria

May 9th, 2010 - Madras Terrace House - 7pm (Premiere)
May 11th, 2010 - Art World (Cenotaph Road) - 6pm
May 12th, 2010 - Ashara (Abhiramapuram) - 7pm
May 13th, 2010 - Spaces (Chandra Mandapa) - 7pm

Synopsis:
Why Dakghar? Why a tribute and not a production of the origninal in-toto...Let's just flesh out the details first. In a range that would include about 2,230 songs and eight novels/four novellas and numerous letters, Tagore's performance text holds a special significance in the history of theatre. His journey began when he was sixteen and played the lead Jyotirindranath's adaptation of Moliere's celebratd Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. His fist tryst with a theatre performance piece was Balmiki Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki) shown in salon/intimate setting in Tagore's own house. In 1890 he wrote Visarjan (Sacrifice)and in 1911-1912, he came up with the classic Dakghar (The Post Office) both in Bangla and in an English translation which he carefully supervised.

During World War II (specifically on July 18, 1942), Polish educator and doctor, Janusz Korczak directed the orphans of the Warsaw ghetto in a moving performance of Dakghar before they were moved to Trebelinka concentration camp. Mahatma Gandhi was moved by Dakghar and Andre Gide read the French version on radio as World War II clouds were looming. Dakghar received rave reviews in Germany and Irish theatre during Tagore's lifetime and interestingly on October 2008 has been commemorated in a stamp by the Department of Posts in Bangalore.

Amal, a terminally ill kid standing on the precipice of death is stuck in a closed room. Sitting inside, he imagines the democracy of open spaces, of the world that he cannot access, the possibility of a king's arrival and the indefatigueable urge to learn from everybody passing by the details of life. Finally, the royal physician carries a letter from the King which eases the child. Does he die or moves to another domain?

Using Aga Shahid Ali's Country Without a Post Office, a video trribute of the exiled young Sri Lankan filmmaker Somieetharan and Gujarati legend Dhumketu's story Post Office...the performance creates a haunting tribute/interpretation of Tagore's text. The play deals with the core issue of what dies within us before we actually die. Using installation as a metaphor and unrelenting images through puppets and video fragments that range from Dantewada to philosopher Zizek, the performance searches for the version of utopia that is neither downloadable nor steeped in some clever praxis.

Amal, of the Dakghar, lives to fight another day.

About the director:
An independent media analyst and a performance consultant by profession, Mr. Parnab Mukherjee is one of the leading alternative theatre directors' of the country. He divides his time between Kolkata, Imphal and the Darjeeling hills.

Currently, a consultant with two publication initiatives, he has earlier worked for a sports fortnightly, an English daily and a Bengali daily. He is an acclaimed authority on Badal Sircar's theatre, Shakespeare-in-education and specialises in theatre-for-conflict-resolution and theatre-of-the-campus.

He is considered as a leading light in alternative theatre in the country having directed more than 150 full-length/workshop productions. These include full-length plays, workshop performances, theatre interventions, non-verbal texts, invisible theatre, promenade theatre, structured work-in-progress, site-specific theatre and installation-based performance.

Parnab has created a personal idiom of using spaces for theatre exploration. He has extensively worked on a range of human rights issues which include specific theatre projects on anti-uranium project struggle in Jadugoda, Save Tenzin Delek campaign, rehabilitation after industrial shutdowns, shelter issue of the de-notified tribes, a widely acclaimed cycle of 12 plays against Gujarat genocide, and a range of issues on north-east with special reference to Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958.

He is the artistic director of Best of Kolkata Campus- an autonomous non-registered performance collective and a performance foundry, that has completed 18 years of doing dedicated theatre in found spaces and public arena.

Some of the most memorable productions of the collective include Trilogy of Unrest (Hamletmachine, Necropolis, This room is not my room), River Series (used as a exploratory adocacy tool by Unifem, Undoc and Kripa Foundation), Only Curfew, Rehearsing Antigone, Raktakarabi-an urban sound opera, Buddha Files, Kasper-dipped and shredded, They Also Work, Dead-Talk series, Conversations with the dead, Crisis of Civilisation, Shakespeare shorts, Man to Man talk, Inviting Ibsen for a Dinner with Ibsen, Your path wrong path and And the Dead Tree Gives no Shelter.

Four of his major workshop modules: Freedomspeak, The Otherness of the Body, Conflict as a Text and The Elastic Body have been conducted with major theatre groups and campuses all over the country. He has written four books of performance texts. He curates a series called Talk Gandhi and the Festival of Here and Now.