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Born on the 5th of May, 1947, acclaimed playwright and director Probir Guha embarked upon his career as a street theatre activist immediately after graduation from Calcutta University. Initially he began working in the suburban areas of 24 Parganas and Kolkata but after soon becoming disillusioned with the elitism of urban theatre, he established his own company, the Living Theatre, in 1977. Khardaha, an industrial suburb 19 km away from Kolkata was specifically chosen as the location to form and base Living Theatre. It’s distance from Kolkata allowed the group to resist the values of urban drama and also the threats to its integrity posed by the commercialism and economic pressures of the city. Actors were recruited from among the under privileged of the area and theatre, shaped by their own struggle and suffering, was formed. For 10 years Living Theatre performed plays every Saturday in a local primary school mostly written and directed by Guha himself and based upon local and regional themes for immediate presentation and critical analysis. While trying to improvise production/performance methods to communicate with ruro-urban audiences he later went on to form the Alternative Living Theatre (ALT) in 1991 at Madhyamgram. Guha’s work with the Alternative Living Theatre has been witnessed by international theatre practitioners of global repute, including Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, John Martin, Badal Sirkar and Bibhash Chakroborty and many other theatre giants. Guha has also worked personally with these individuals as well as theatre personalities and dancers such as Peter Schuman, Toshi Tsicuteri (music director: Mahabharat), Sanjukta Panigrahi (Oddisi, India), Micado Cadet (Vudu, Haiti), I made Pasek Tempo (Topeng and Legong, Bali), Katsuko Ajuma (Kabuki and Noh, Japan), Sudhir Kumar, (Chhow, India), V.Pandian and Krishna Das (Kalaripayatt,India), Lokendrajit Singh (Kabui Naga, India), Ojha Mangi (Thang Ta, India), Hu Chun Li (Peking Opera, China), P.N. Rajeev (Kathakali, India). Alongside working dedicatedly in and around his native West Bengal, he has also conducted workshops in most of the major cities of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Hong Kong, Denmark, Sweden, Japan and also at the Tisch School of Drama New York University. He has directed plays also throughout India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand and Hong Kong. For his own group, the ALT, he has written and directed over 70 plays. As well such as involvement with his own work, Guha has been Creative Initiator for the projects ‘Aditi’ and ‘Mela’ for the Festival Of India in the United States where he directed collective performances by seventy five folk performers from India at the Smithsonium Institute, Washington. Other projects include his direction of ‘We Are’ with Castillo Theatre Centre, New York, his participation with the Theatre of Sources in 1980, conducted by Grotowski in Poland and the International School for Theatre Anthropology conducted by Eugenio Barba at Bonn. In 1998 he was invited to Tokyo and Sendai in Japan for the Asia meets Asia festival and in 2002 he was invited to participate as a resource person in the Images of Asia festival in Denmark. Guha’s plays consistently resound with themes such as the attack upon communalism, social obscurantism, oppressive social conventions, superstition and political apathy, while always attempting to sow the seeds of change in the human mind. His central ethoproclaims that theatre is the birthright of all individuals and should thus be made accessible to all people by refraining from turning it into a costly and elitist affair. However, whichever method one chooses to realize this vision, the most important factor is to constantly make discoveries during the process of creation, thus liberating ourselves from tired clichés. Plays are often written for performance purposes and as such don’t possess the power to address contemporary issues of different times and places. Guha believes this to be the result of conditioning, where a person allows him/herself to think only within the scope of a certain realm. Thus process, he believes, leads to fossilization. Thus deconditioning is needed for every artist to prevent them from becoming instituionalised. Guha also attacks drama that intellectualizes oppression and exploitation and in so doing, makes the reality safe for the audience instead of compelling them to confront it; “It is not enough to show the death of a man in the performance and earn applause; it is necessary to make visible the pain of dying, to disturb and challenge the audience to confront the image of their reality.” In his practice, Guha employs the overpowering impact of direct and innocent communication and therefore rejects conventional notions of dramatic form. Rarely do his productions follow a linear mode of narration but are instead violent in momentum and impassioned in utterance. The dramatic compositions have been likened to choreographic variations on a central theme, emerging as extended metaphors in choral speech, ensemble movements, dance and song. This individual form, which he is constantly creating are all fruits of his long-spent interactions with local rituals, folk forms, martial arts and classical dance. The actors he works with are always encouraged to do their own thinking and to actively express themselves and improvise according to the changing condition of the performance, thus creating truly Living Theatre. “I want to relive what I experience everyday. Theater is true, as real as hunger. It’s happening all the time. My purpose is to make it happen all over again”. Probir Guha has created many theatre groups in rural Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and is constantly sharing experiences with them to create a theatre movement for the common people, who are active in their own area. He was also President and founder member of NATI (Nationwide Alternative Theater Initiative), Executive Member of SATCO (South Asian Theatre Committee), member of IDEA (International Drama/Theatre & Education Association, Netherlands), General Secretary, Bahirangan (a forum of experimental theatre groups), and is also a member of Paschim Banga Natya Akademi. He is also visiting teacher of many theatre Institutions and Universities in India and abroad. Probir Guha has been awarded SANGEET NATAK AKADEMI AWARD( highest honor of India Govt.) in 2008 for DIRECTION and also received National Senior Fellowship by the Ministry of Human Resource Department. And also has received commemorative Awards for his contribution to people’s theatre from the American Biographical Institute. In 2005 he has felicitated by the Ayna Theatre, and Theatre Workshop, Kolkata, for his lifetime achievement.
 * Probir Guha

As well as impassioned involvement in theatre, Guha has also acted in two films by Buddhadev Das Gupta and Sandip Roy and has directed two telefilms in Santhali and in Bengali languages.