User talk:Cochrainecut

Since three decades, Ratan Thiyam (pronounced RAH-tahn TEE-yum), the founding director of the Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur, India, has been writing and staging plays that uses ancient Indian theater traditions and forms in a contemporary context—and that profess a deep concern with the yearnings for social equilibrium and spiritual progress in the midst of war and violence.

Each of Ratan Thiyam’s play infuses rationalised and multifaceted analysis of different viewpoints. Using alluring theatrical stagecraft his works are coloured with literary beauty and meaning. Most of Ratan Thiyam’s plays are rather indianised thematically are influential artworks with global appeal..

His latest production “Nine Hills One Valley “( “Chinglon Mapan Tampak Ama”) is, based on the chaotic upheavals of the world and more particularly the contemporary events in Manipur, in a metaphorical and sensitive manner.

Thiyam’s 1996 play Uttar-Priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude), for example, deals at length with the spiritual journey of emperor Ashoka, the second-century B.C. warrior king who ultimately renounces violence, adopts Buddhism and becomes known as Priyadarshi, “one who looks with compassion.” The work however cannot be described as a play in the traditional sense of Western theater. It is a metaphorical drama incorporating song and speech, dance and gesture, bold color and light in a highly stylized and ritualistic fashion. The Chorus Repertory Theatre’s performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2000 compelled New York Times critic Margo Jefferson to call Thiyam “a genius” and “the experience of seeing Uttar-Priyadarshi transcendent.”

Thiyam has also worked with the Fordham University Theatre Company, directing a production of The Blind Age by Dharmavir Bharati. Based on the classic Indian epic Mahabharata, The Blind Age is one of India’s most widely produced modern plays—and, like many of Thiyam’s own plays, it is explicitly concerned with the horrors of war.

On Oct. 12 in Pope Auditorium on the Lincoln Center campus, a documentary film called Some Roots Grow Upward: The Theatre of Ratan Thiyam (2002) was screened. Following the screening, Thiyam spoke on stage with Lawrence Sacharow, chair of the Fordham theatre department.

“Theater is a human space,” Thiyam told the audience. “It is a medium to ask questions, like how should society be shaped. I want a theater that will at least help put those questions to the audience…so that the audience starts thinking what [the actors in the play] should do.”

For decades, Manipur, where Thiyam’s theater company is based, has been the scene of much violence. Tribal and ethnic insurgencies have led to the death of thousands, and activist groups have staged protests against the national government’s anti-terrorism laws, which are designed to control the northeast Indian state’s various separatist movements.

Throughout the documentary, scenes of unrest in Manipur are intercut with scenes of Thiyam and members of the Chorus Repertory Theatre rehearsing and performing several of his plays at their nearby campus, where they live and work together. By juxtaposing real and staged scenes of violence, the film explores the age-old aesthetic and contemporary sociopolitical sources of Thiyam’s work, and highlights his creative response to the social ills of his home state.

Thiyam acknowledged the influence of the Natya Sastra (a treatise on theatre written by Bharata during the second-century B.C.) and, to a lesser extent, elements of ancient Greek drama and the Noh theatre of Japan, but said that his approach to the theater is formed by his years of study with several gurus of the traditional Manipuri performing arts. “I always go back to the classical age of theater. It helps me understand more and more,” said Thiyam. “But we are not always arguing for a representation of the history. … This theater is not meant only for elite audiences; it is also meant for the common people, people who have a common knowledge of everything.”