Protiti’s poems are mostly ‘bare’ conversational musings exploring ‘selfhood, separation, exile, love and longing’.
2020 was not a very eventful year for live theatre, as the world of performances, where social mingling is one of the prime cultures, was viciously invaded by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Aly Zaker, my Galileo, made his final exit in the early hours of November 27, 2020, bringing about a nationwide realisation of loss and shock.
With the slogan, Aai Natoker Ongone, seven new plays, written by young playwrights and directed by young directors, were staged throughout Nagorik Natya Sampradaya’s Notuner Utshab 2019 at Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, from November 29 to December 5.
Chronicling Bangladesh Theatre and Liberation War Plays inevitably persuades one to explore how proscenium theatre culture came in this subcontinent, especially in this part of India, that is Bengal, for, contrasted with our open-stage Jatra that does not divide the audience from the performers, a proscenium stage is the “arch or opening separating the stage from the auditorium together with the area immediately in front of the arch”. This Greek tradition came to India sometimes in the mid-18th century and obviously it is a colonial cultural legacy.
Pir (variant spelling: Peer) is purely a subcontinent concept that has etymological root in Persian language. In English, the word can be translated into saint or more specifically, holy man.
More than once I have written in this column that Bangla theatre lacks musicals though we have a reasonably long tradition of dance-drama introduced by Rabindranath Thakur.
Bangla translation of Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo was staged almost two score and eight years back by Nagorik Natya Somprodaya and it immediately created tremendous vibes in the theater arena of Bangladesh, and of course there were multiple reasons for that.
His plan was to produce the play as a multi-group production funded by Goethe Institute, Dhaka but it somehow did not work that way. The gentleman left Bangladesh with huge frustration.
Paulo Coelho in a note on his 1987-Novel The Alchemist, wrote—before the novel was translated from Portuguese to English—that he one day received a letter from HarperCollins that read, 'reading The Alchemist was like getting up at dawn and seeing the sun rise while the rest of the world still slept.
Perhaps her name was Cynthia Warren, an American expatriate English language teacher at Dhaka University Institute of Modern Languages, around late seventies or early eighties of the last millennium.
International Theatre Institute (ITI) Bangladesh Centre completed its thirty-six years in March 2018. Throughout the long 36 years, it has proved to the world of performing arts that sans so-called professionalism, theater workers of this country have been able to create an ambiance of professional skill in theatre.
Just after two years, that is, in 1948, International Theatre Institute (ITI) was created aiming at building 'an organization that was aligned with UNESCO's goals on culture, education and the arts.'
Thus in Greek city states, especially for Athenian citizens, it is rumored, watching theater was mandatory. But that was fine with city states with a handful of population.
About ninety years ago, Rabindranath Tagore felt apprehensive about the rise of materialistic approaches in our so-called civilised society and expressed his uneasiness in at least three, if not more, of his literary works: “Raktokarabi”, a play; “Sabhyatar Sankot”, an essay; and “Sabhyatar Prati”, a poem.