To stage or not to stage Tagore : performing Tagore's plays / Rajdeep Konar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Konar, Rajdeep, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tagore, Rabindranath, 1861-1941--Dramatic production.

Tagore, Rabindranath.

Tagore, Rabindranath, 1861-1941--Criticism and interpretation.

Tagore, Rabindranath, 1861-1941.

Theater.

Physical Description:

xlv, 388 pages : ilustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023.

La Mesa, CA : Social Science Press, 2023.

Biography/History:

Rajdeep Konar is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. He was born and brought at Santiniketan and has received his early education at Visva-Bharati, the institution set up by poet/educationist Rabindranath Tagore. For his doctoral project completed at School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University he has worked on the relationship between 'theatre' and the 'archive' through a case study of productions of Rabindranath Tagore's plays. He has been part of conceptualization and execution of multiple performances at Santiniketan, Kolkata and New Delhi. For the past few years he has been working closely with the Kolkata based blind theatre group Anyadesh, documenting their work as well as functioning as a sighted facilitator. He has recently received a grant from India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore to prepare a documentary monograph on the group. His articles have appeared in reputed journals like Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Economic & Political Weekly and Theatre Research International.

Summary:

Rabindranath Tagore (18611941) was a prolific playwright with more than thirty plays to his credit. He is also known for his life-long, passionate engagement with theatre, first at Jorasanko and then at Santiniketan, in multiple roles as actor, director, singer, musician. However, during his own life-time and even after his demise, his experimental plays have proved challenging for directors to stage. Time and again they have been written off as unstageable by prominent theatre makers. Further complications have arisen from the presence of a spectre of authority around Tagore and his plays often promoted by Visva-Bharati, the institution he founded and which held the copyright of his works till 2001. This book travels through time and space intending to untangle the enigma presented by Tagore's plays. The book on one hand immerses itself into the archive of Tagore's plays and his dramaturgy of them in order to problematize the ways in which they have been interpreted. On the other, it also engages with productions of Tagore's plays during and after his life-time to understand the challenges directors have faced while staging them and the strategies they have embraced to circumvent them. While performing a subjective critical reading of the Tagore theatre-archive, an underlying objective of the book remains to understand the very concept of the archive, as it manifests itself in contemporary dramatic theatre.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: I. Sokher Theatre at Thakurbari: Inception and Formative Experiments

Sokh: A Mode of Art Pratice

Cultural Hybridity at Thakurbari

Naba Natak: First Major Production at the Jorasanko Theatre

Balmiki Protibha: A Career in Theatre Unveils

II. Freedom to Play: Exploring a New Language of Theatre at Santiniketan

Rangmancha: The Lacuna of a Treatise and the Enigma of the Hiatus

Sarodotsau: A New Historicality

Textual Departures

Performative Departures

III. Where Opposites Meet: Tagore in the Public Theatre of Bengal

Early Commercial Theatre in Bengal

Jyotirindranath and Rabindranath: Formal Exchanges

Rabindranath and the Art Theatre Ltd.: Breaking of the Ice

Tagore and Bhaduri: The Fortuitous Friendship

IV. Performing the Archive: Bohurupee's Raktakarabi (1954)

Claims and Counter-Claims of Authorship

Blood or Oleander: Symbolic or Real?

Inquiring into Tagore's Symbolist Plays

A Dramaturgy of Textual Deconstruction

A Tagorean Idea of Indian Theatre

V. Dramaturgy as Contingent Encounter: Dakghar outside Bengal

Dakghar. Questions Realting to Translation and the Popularity of the Play

Kanhailal's Dakghar. Lyrical Dramaturgy in the Manipuri Context

Dakghar at the Abbey: Cultural Sterotypes, Friendship, Faux Pas and Unequal Power Relations

Jill Parvin's The Post Office: Re-Connecting through Re-Enactment

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781032389257

1032389257

OCLC:

1346948142