Folk dancer of the Eastern world tunes in to Irish drama with Birpurus

What do you expect when it''s a combo of an Irish dramatist and a folk dancer from Bengal? This isn''t another story of a fusion concert. On Monday, as part of the Chetana Arts Festival, Natyayan will be staging its latest production, Birpurus, at Rabindra Sadan. It is in this play that the Irish dramatist and the folk dancer from Bengal come together.
Birpurus is a play based on J.M.Synge''s Playboy of the Western World. "I was directing this play at Tufts University in Boston. It was then that it occurred to me that the script can be recreated with an essentially Bengali touch," said Sudipto Chatterjee who is directing Birpurus.
In order to do it, Sudipto has set his present production in a remote village in Purulia. And it is here that the folk dancer from Bengal — chhau maestro Gambhir Singh Moorha of Purulia''s Charida village — comes in. "Gambhir Singh has composed the music and done the choreography which forms an intrinsic part of the action since the hero himself is a chhau dancer," said Chatterjee.
In fact, the music and choreography in Birpurus is Singh''s last work, before he passed away early this month. "We had arranged for his eye surgery as a mark of gratitude," informed Chatterjee, "and the news of his death came as a shock to us, just after the day when we had seen him off from Howrah after a successful eye-operation."
Birpurush is about the confused definition of a hero in the modern world. It is also about the perversion of the artiste. With stage design by Chandan Sen, lights by Joy Sen, this might well be another of Chatterjee''s hatke productions, like Nuraldeener Sarajeebon, which was produced in the Nandikar Theatre Festival a few years back. If not for anything else, it might be worth a dekho just as a last specimen of one of the greatest exponents of chhau in India, the President''s award winner Gambhir Singh Moorha.
sudip.ghosh@timesgroup.com