Theatre Adda – The Park Street Sessions V

Mahal Suhail, is from Lahore. She is young – a singer, poet, image maker & a performing artist, who journeys into her neighborhood – for her love of ‘Indian’ classical music, and for a quest for creative discoveries. Janardhan Ghosh – a traversal personality having traveled the contours of ‘Bengali’ theatre of Badal Sarkar, Anjan Dutta & others, trained with Włodzimierz Staniewski. He is a poet, writer, actor, currently a lecturer of English at Vivekananda University. He is a scholar of religious philosophy and a raconteur.

The two artists meet in Kolkata on the Katha Koli platform. Katha Koli, is a new age storytelling platform,  uses multimedia and interdisciplinary art practices to tell stories of – if we could quote D H Lawrence, ” Perfected bygone moments, perfected moments in the glimmering futurity”, as also of existential crises and and a less than perfect ambiguity.

‘Trunk Call ‘, is a dialogue between two characters. Centered around the enigmatic verses of Jibananda Das, this is the story of man who is afflicted with mental deformity, which confines him within the comfortable recesses of a pastiche of limited world-view, unable to fathom the depth or navigate the width of life. He converses obsessively with a woman – articulate and possessing clarity & fortitude. She has traveled far and beyond, and now she is drawn quite unfathomably to this obstinate man who is anchored like a boat to a sea washed rock, as the winds of change rocks him – but what does an anchored boat have to do with the wind –   but to be smitten to pieces or to silently rot and rust.

‘Trunk Call’, is an attempt to reconfigure our relationship with our past & the present, in order to forge a paradigm in oral narrative & performativity.

Please do write to info.kathakoli@gmail.com, with your questions, feedbacks & suggestions.