Theatre | The Wife's Letter
Prarthana Purkayastha presents:
Running Time: 60 minutes
Showing: Wed 9th Jul
Full: £5
Concession:£5
Language: English
The Wife's Letter. A 28-year-old Bengali woman, Mrinal, writes a letter to her husband. She will not return to his home, she says. She has had enough.
Through her letter, Mrinal reveals her secret life as a poet. She also recounts the tragic life of a young widow, Bindu, who is pushed to commit suicide.
Will Mrinal follow the same path?
The Wife's Letter (2007) is a contemporary dance-theatre solo based on Streer Patra (1914), a controversial pro-feminist short story written by the Nobel laureate poet and author Rabindranath Tagore. Integrating film, music, text and dance, the piece revisits and re-interprets Mrinal's story and sets it in contemporary London. Weaving together the visually iconic, vibrant and contrasting worlds of Brick Lane and Hampstead Heath, The Wife's Letter combines choreography and film to create an unusual theatre experience.
The Wife's Letter is an independent artistic collaboration featuring filmmaker Sangeeta Datta, composer Soumik Datta and dancer-choreographer Prarthana Purkayastha.
Home and the World 1905. The year Bengal is partitioned - a time of escalating violence, of chauvinistic nationalism and rampant militancy
Rabindranath Tagore's Ghare Baire (1915) is set in the chaos of this time. At the heart of this novel is Bimala, a young Bengali bride, caught in a maze of passion, adultery, narcissism, betrayal and sacrifice.
Home and the World (2007) is a contemporary reworking of Tagore's novel through the language of dance, theatre and music. Using spoken text (Sangeeta Datta), music (Soumik Datta) and choreography (Prarthana Purkayastha), the production is both powerful and explosive, confronting through its narrative the aggression and terror of our own age.
The Artists
Sangeeta Datta is a film historian, critic and documentary filmmaker. She runs a London based cultural organisation BAITHAK and a production company Stormglass Productions. She has written a book on the eminent Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal (World Director Series, British Film Institute, 2002) and works closely with education and programming departments at the National Film Theatre, London. Her film on Indian women filmmakers, The Way I See It, has travelled widely to film festivals. Her films In Search of Durga and Letter from an Ordinary Girl have been telecast in UK and India. Sangeeta has worked as Associate Director with the internationally renowned Indian filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh on several film projects including Chokher Bali (2003) Raincoat (2005) and The Last Lear (2007). She is Associate Director of the forthcoming UK film Brick Lane. She teaches Filmic Narratives- an MA course on South Asian cinema at the School for English Studies, University of London.
Soumik Datta is a musician-composer who trained under Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta in playing the Sarod. Winner of the prestigious Music Award at the Croydon Music Festival in 2002, he has allied with several distinguished artists such as U Srinivas, Shankar Mahadevan, Taufiq Qureshi, Pete Locket and Pandit Dinesh. In 2005, the Allegro Vivo Festival, Vienna invited Soumik to play alongside the national orchestra for an original composition: Puja Trinity. His Indian melodic compositions interspersed with orchestral harmony have earned him considerable repute and resulted in collaborations with mainstream artists such as Beyonce Knowles, the rapper Jay-Z and singer/song-writer Sarah Maclaughlin. Soumik is founder-member of the British contemporary music ensemble Samay. He has won the prestigious Sanskriti Indian award for young musicians this year.
Prarthana Purkayastha is an independent dancer-choreographer and an academic. Trained in Navanritya (New Dance), a South Asian contemporary dance methodology, she has performed and taught across India, the United States and Britain. She has been the recipient of several prestigious awards and grants, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for Outsider (2005), the AHRC grant for From Hecabe (2004), a Ford Foundation grant for residency at the American Dance Festival (2003), and the Paul Foundation award for her doctoral research on dance. She has taught as a lecturer at the London Contemporary Dance School and her collaborations with other artists include Akademi's Awaz for the Trafalgar Square Festival (2006), Versedance (Goethe Institute-Kolkata 2003, 2004) and the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) funded Highway Performance Circuits (2001)
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