Breaking barriers

Theatre brought Meena Natarajan and Dipankar Mukherji together. They are involved in their Pangea World Theatre in Minneapolis, producing and directing plays in a predominantly White world. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN profiles the artistes.

AS STUDENTS of English and zoology in the Madras Christian College in the 1980s, young Dipankar Mukherji and Meena Natarajan knew two things: they were in love with each other, and with theatre. But while playing Oscar Wilde with the best Brit accent they could muster in inter-collegiate shows, or doing activist street plays, they could have hardly foreseen that eventually, they would make waves on shores far from their hometown.

Meena has blossomed into a playwright (eight plays, two co- written), and has been elected president of the international association of women playwrights at their last meet in Athens (2000). At the moment, she is working on "Without My Country" about three generations of Indian-American women in the U.S.

Dipankar is best known here as the director of Girish Karnad's "Nagamandala" at The Guthrie Theatre in the U.S. (of which he was the first and so far the only, non-white Resident Director). He may have picked up craft skills in his college courses, and in leading repertories in England, Cleveland and Atalanta before settling in Minneapolis, but what makes Dipankar stand out is his Indian background, his constant, even belligerent assertion that he comes from a land with an older tradition of dramaturgy than the West. His highly choreographed use of movement, dance and chanting are drawn from that matrix. He also makes conscious use of the immigrant experience of several racial backgrounds, charging his interpretation with psychological depth and multicultural density.

The couple are now involved with their own Pangea World Theatre, Minneapolis, "committed to international works, styles and traditions". It brings people of different communities together - whether Argentinian or African, Korean or Caucasian - to celebrate cross-ethnic differences. Wole Soyinka's protege Awam Ampka (Nigeria), is invited to direct his own "Not in My Season of Songs"; a visiting group of Bosnian artists seek a meeting with Pangea; South African playwright Athol Fugard conducts a workshop; Chennai's Anita Ratnam choreographs Indian love poetry in "The Inner World"; the mystifying, multiple-layered "Rashomon", adapted by Meena Natarajan and Luu Pham, details a crime of long ago in Japan; Chinua Achebe's "No Longer at Ease" becomes the universal image of contemporary displacement. Shakespeare and Sophocles find new interpretations in "The Tempest" and "Ajax".

"Most Americans believe Peter Brooks wrote 'The Mahabharata'! And they invariably ask if he is our model," fumes Dipankar. "But that's a bad analogy. Brooks is White, he is from the Royal Shakespeare Company, he belongs to the glitterati. People don't get upset with experiments or modernistic take offs by White artistes. Whereas we, as people of colour, have to fight every step of the way simply to be visible."

He explains that there is no reverse domination of coloured people in Pangea. "Chauvinism of any race, Black or White, is uprooted by our casting, and by the themes we choose." The approach aims at subtle, symbolic, non-realistic theatre, to recreate its "sacred, provocative artistic space." The goal is to strive for excellence. Isn't drama our most intense forum for discussion and debate?

Idealistic? You have to be, if you pursue serious theatre. And as coloured people in a predominantly White world, you have to be tough to survive. You can sense both anger and amusement as Dipankar describes some of his recent challenges, as with Ionesco's "The Rhinoceres". By casting a native American in the key role of the man who watches everyone around him transforming into rhinocereses, the Indian director radically reversed the position of the white viewers, his main audience. They were no longer those who saw coloured people as 'the Other'. They were 'the Other' people now, in the perspective of the Native American, whose race had been decimated by the ruthless colonisers. Such casting also gave a wholly new slant to the question of the rights of the Blacks and the Asian immigrants in the New World!

"The critics were upset," says Dipankar. They had already been complaining that they couldn't find an angle to critique Pangea's productions. "This time they asked me what right do you have to deal so differently with a classic of the Western world, with our heritage?"

Suddenly he breaks into a laugh. "Do you know, at the Guthrie, every actor who came for audition would pass me by, and hand over his papers to my embarrassed white assistant! How sheepish they looked when they realised I was the boss!" Not content with the marginalised realm of NRI theatre, Meena and Dipankar proved that they could work with the dominant Anglo-Saxon on equal terms. But now the choice is to find co-relations in world cultures.

"The White American artiste can focus totally on his art. But we are terribly hampered. We have to be politically savvy, we have to discuss our race, justify our existence before we can talk about our art!" says Meena.

"We get tired of having to assert ourselves in this amazingly polarised society," Dipankar sighs. "A White director doing "Ajax" needs only to explain his artistic concept. But I have to constantly negotiate my way into the mainstream, talk, talk, talk about why I'm casting a Liberian, a Vietnamese or a Cuban in a Greek play, justify why I'm doing what I'm doing, what's my right to do it..."

Meena and Dipankar will tell you, somewhat ruefully, that they get maximum crowds for their post-play discussions than for the plays!

There's a growing interest among the NRIs in Pangea's work. "But they do tell us we must entertain more, and not be so intellectual." Dipankar adds, "Sadly, Indian culture out there seems to begin and end with Indian films."

Meena Natarajan and Dipankar Mukherji try to time their hometown visits during the December music season. This year, Dipankar has stayed back for his lessons in kalari. Their dream is to bring their productions to India.

Hasn't their work on a foreign soil made them more aware of their own socio-political identity? Find new artistic expressions for the human condition in cross-cultural existence?

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