Man of the Heart has actually been in preparation for the last 15
years. Sudipto Chatterjee has a had a long-standing interest in Lalon
Phokir since childhood. Over the years, he has informally learned the
songs and trained himself to perform the music. His interest in Lalon
was shared by friend and theatre-director, Suman Mukherjee. They
had both been educating themselves by reading all they could on
Lalon and the Baul-Phokir tradition. They have consulted with the best
scholars on Lalon Phokir and the Baul-Phokir tradition -- Sudhir
Chakrbarti and Shaktinatha Jha in India, Abul Ahsan Choudhury in
Bangladesh, and, Carol Salomon in the USA.
In 1997, Sudipto and Suman went to Kushtia in Bangladesh to enrich
their academic research with field work, with the specific intention of
creating a theatrical piece on the saint. But the nature of the subject
matter made it difficult to create a coherent piece. So nothing came out
of it immediately, as the two friends continued to work in their
respective careers.
Workshop at UC, Berkeley
Finally, in September 2005, the academic work came together with the
elements of live performance -- music and forms of South Asian folk
theater -- and multi-media technology in the shape of a workshop
production at the University of California in Berkeley. Produced by the
Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, it was made
possible by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities with
their prestigious "Artist-in-Residence Fellowship" to Suman Mukherjee
to come to Berkeley and create this piece with Sudipto Chatterjee, who
by then was a member of the faculty at UC, Berkeley.
By this time, more than 15 years had elapsed since Suman and
Sudipto had first imagined this as a collaborative project. Their thinking
had matured over time: Lalon's philosophy and music were by now
inhabiting their inner beings. They were now ready to realize what had
thus far been a cherished dream.
They worked furiously over August and September in a unique
process of theatrical creation. This was no straight-forward play with a
predictable plot line, with the usual highs and lows of conflict and
climax. Rather, it was a mix of academic archeology and musical
expression, brought together by means of theatre. Given these
difficulties, the written script first emerged in the form of 5 pages of
"structure notes." These notes then became the basis of the first
attempts at the creation of a stage mise-en-scene. As the stage
visions kept emerging in rehearsal they goaded the rest of text to
emerge. Lalon has hundreds of songs that the author felt were worth
including in the play, but since that was not possible, often only
snippets from the songs were kept and the lines of the songs
themselves seemed to guide the pen of the playwright, along with the
visual suggestions that came from the director's "realization" of Lalon
on stage. The final play text, thus, emerged through a unique circular
exchange between visual imagination, literary creativity, thorough
academic research, and a deep spiritual knowledge shared between
the director and writer/performer.
Lalon and the World
The "workshop" production of Man of the Heart at Berkeley was
received very enthusiastically by all who saw it (see Reviews 1 & 2).
Encouraged by the response, the two friends thought of pushing it
towards a larger audience and approached East Coast Artists to do a
professional run of the performance in New York, nurturing dreams of
taking the show on the road.
To South Asia and beyond..... To take Lalon beyond his familiar
habitat and present him before a global audience who have missed out
on his genius.
