Performance by Natya Chatana
Natya Chetana showed the participants of this SIG some scenes of one of their Community theatre plays, titled: “Dhola Suna?” meaning “White Gold?”
The play starts with a song describing Kalahandi as the best part of Orissa producing agricultural crops. But now it is known for hunger death. Then the symbolic MNC character, a foreigner enters to an Adivasi village and declares formulae of agriculture, which can give a lot of money or Gold in turn. He says he has bought seeds of cropping Gold. The people then are offered Bank loan and the local Moneylender also provides hand loans. The foreigner fixes up a middleman to help his products to be sold out in villages. The farmers are taking the seeds and a poor Adivasi motivates his wife to get her only Gold ornament to make a hand lone against the guarantee as others have done. He attempts the new seed and gets a lot of money. So he comes back with more Gold ornaments including the old one, which he has invested. The wife becomes excited and offers all the ornaments to invest for further crops. The farmer when does that then gets worms eating out the crops. So he again asks the solution to the foreigner and the foreigner sales pesticides. So the farmer has to make more hand loans. The farmer uses pesticide and the Mother Earth is getting pain due to that. But the farmer gets crops again and becomes happy. He is not able to see the pain of Mother Earth. He collects the product for sale. Then a buyer-businessman comes and bargains at his term and the farmer is not agreeing. Suddenly there is a thundershower and the crops get spoiled. He looses the crops.
Looking at the helpless situation and the kick of the hunger the wife encourages to start own traditional cropping to get at least food to eat. Then they try to adopt their manual way of making the land ready but the wife becomes sick. The farmer is not able to give a little water from the sources around as the water has been polluted by the pesticides. When he wants to carry his wife to the village health consultant on the way the wife dies. The Mother Earth appears and says – “her health condition has become like the farmer’s wife. If the farmers will continue to use pesticides then She will not be able to give any plant to grow and finally die.”
Then the farmers come to a realisation that adoption of the Foreigners idea to become ‘rich’ has to be dropped. By singing the last song, all chase the Foreigner-MNC out of the village.
The inter-disciplinary integration in “Dhola Suna”: - Indian Theatre is always an inter disciplinary performance. There has to be Singers, Dancers and Actors on stage. Many a times the actors also play musical instruments on stage. This kind of theatre style is existing since a long. At this moment in Orissa state about 15 theatre forms are existing with a history about 500 years at least.
- In “Dhola Suna”, you can find even the use of Mask which is also a regular par of traditional theatre of India. The textile is also an artistic expression in India/Orissa which is used as costume. So experts of various faculties get engaged in Indian Theatre. Each of those artistic angles has its own style which can be performed independently. In “Dhola Suna” we highlighted the play as one of the example which had – Song (which is also independently famous in our state as Sambalpuri songs), Musical instruments (Dhol which is a unique instrument with tribal dances), Dance movement(following the folk dance steps with the songs), Acting style (giving emphasis on visual side with some melo touches), Mask (traditionally made and improvised ones), indigenous style of textile as costume (also famous as Sambalpuri textiles) etc..
- The artists performed in this play was a kind of inter disciplinary attempt as there were urban, rural and tribal artists together playing the theatre, which is always difficult as they follow completely different mother tongues and life style. So the dramatic texts are always inter disciplinary from literature point of view.
Questions after the presentation of the play Afterwards there were a few questions about the process of the making of this theatre play as well as about the mix of music, dance and theatre. As Subodh Patnaik had to leave for a rehearsal, he answered these questions shortly by indicating that the India theatre always had mixed art forms in their theatre, since centuries.