French touch to Santhali theatre team

WEST MIDNAPORE: By day they are farmers, but after sundown, they gather around a mud house at Borotalpada — a Santhal village — to act and dance. And, they have a teacher too — a French man who speaks and understands their language and culture. Meet Jean Frederick Chevalier, a poet and dramatist, who has adopted the village near Midnapore city and helped form the country’s first Santhali group theatre. After 10 years of rigorous practice, members of the group — ‘Trimukhi’ — have started touring the country for professional shows.
Their recent production is called ‘Home Made Theatre’. It is a multilingual production in Santhali, Hindi, Bengali, French and English, with dialogues in different languages seamlessly merging with each other. The text of the drama has also been experimentally created by merging thoughts of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, German poet Peter Handke and Chinese novelist Gao Xingjian. Chevalier wove these texts into a simple narrative to showcase the traditional Santhali way of life and thinking.
While at Borotalpada, the performance takes place around mud houses, elsewhere, it happens with a wall at the backdrop that acts as a screen on which a typical Santhal life is projected and the characters act out in front. The members are just back from Delhi after two highly-acclaimed performances. The group was invited by the consulates of France and Japan.
Back home, they have tied up with Vidyasagar University in West Midnapore and recently gave an open-air performance. The university has a tribal museum, the walls of which were innovatively used as backdrop and props for the performance.
“We are proud that a multifaceted talent like Chevalier, who has given up teaching philosophy at University of Sorbonne, Paris, to explore the world of tribal theatre, has approached us for partnership,” said Debashish Bandyopadhyay, head of department of English at Vidyasagar University.
“It’s a different narrative expression. The beauty of the entire experiment is Jean’s urge to understand the indigenous tribal ethos and weaving a creative tapestry around it,” said theatre expert Ananda Lal.
French Theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine is so inspired with ’Trimukhi’ that she has invited the group to tour France professionally.