TheatrEX’s play “Dokkhina Sundori” was staged on July 24 at the inaugural evening of the Commonwealth Games' theatre festival at South Rotunda.
Written by Shahman Maishan and directed by Sudip Chakroborthy, the production is supported by the British Council.
The play “Dokkhina Sundari” theatricalizes the epic canvas of primordial living and eternal aspirations in southern part of Bangladesh which is famous as the Sundarbans - world’s largest mangrove forest for its unique bio-geo-cultural diversity for hundreds of years.
The performance gives an interior view by incorporating narrations, conversations, location-specific choreographic bio-mechanics, prose, poetry, lyrics and musical dynamics in a unique form of expressibility. So that it can explores the theatrical aesthetics of fusion of local myths, legends, fairy tales, parables, and contemporary performance idioms that is enthusiastic to unfold the multi-stratified crises of current living in context of corporatized globalization. As a whole the performance travels towards the essence of pantheism.
Folk-tale and history are shaped into the plot of the play which opens with a song praising the beauty and livelihood of the Sundarbans which was alternatively called Chandraban during the ancient period.
The antediluvian folk-tale of the Chandrabande race is portrayed through two main characters, Chandre and Bona, and the legendary tiger-haunter Pochabdi Gazi is an ineluctable character depicting the story. The plot moves forward with a series of dispersed incidents showing the fight for survival of these ignored minorities against the maleficent deeds of the antagonists, who systematically destroy the balance of life in the name of rescuing the forest.
