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Black can be the colour
of hope, creativity and celebration of the human resilience,
finds SPAN writer Ranjita Biswas as she spends time with Blind
Opera, a theatre group of the visually challenged in Kolkata
You go up a rickety stairwell, dark even in the daytime.
The building on crowded Nilmoni Mitra Street in north Calcutta
has seen better days, like many others in this older part
of the city. You enter a small room. The red cement floor
is cool to the bare feet, reminiscent of a past era. The centre
of the room is empty but the corners are stacked with bedrolls,
utensils, water bottles. Musical instruments, drums, cymbals,
gongs are piled in a corner.
Today, the room is filled with the laughter of men and women
in colorful attire. Two garlands of sweet-smelling flowers
and boxes of sweets are arranged on a stool. Two members of
the group are getting married. They exchange the garlands,
bonding as husband and wife. Somebody breaks into a lilting
Bengali song. Among the happy chorus of congratulations and
laughter you notice one difference. Both bride Chumki Pal
and groom Sandeep Chatterjee are blind, as are most of the
people surrounding them. Pal lost her sight at the age of
two due to wrong treatment for an ailment. She is wearing
a bright turquoise blue sari with gold trimmings for this
memorable day. "I know it's blue because people have
told me but I can't imagine how it looks. But believe me,
when I dream, I dream only in colors," she says. Chatterjee
is an undergraduate student majoring in music at Rabindra
Bharati University. Their romance blossomed when they met
as members of Blind Opera, a performing arts group of Calcutta
and the only one of its kind in the country as well as in
Asia that consistently puts on shows like professional groups.
The 36 spirited members of Blind Opera, most of whom are
totally blind, demonstrate that physical disability is not
an obstacle. They enact plays such as Raja (King of the Dark
Chamber) or Raktakarabi (Red Oleander) by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath
Tagore, considered challenging even by veteran theater groups.
Since it was launched, in 1996, Blind Opera has performed
not only in Calcutta but also in other cities. The Opera is
the product of four theater aficionados- Ashok Pramanik, Debashish
Choudhury, Subhashish Gangopadhyay and Prasanta Chatterjee-who
took it as a challenge to get together the talents of these
visually impaired men and women. Except Chatterjee, who is
a social activist, all of them used to be members of well-known
theater groups of the city but broke away to devote their
time and energy to developing the Blind Opera concept.
Why the label "opera" for a drama repertoire? "Well,
in older days our plays were all in opera style," says
director Gangopadhyay. "There was singing, dancing and
dialogues accompanied by instrumental music. And that's what
we do."
The idea of the Blind Opera germinated in 1994 when they
conducted a workshop at the Calcutta Blind School at Behala
in the southern fringe of the city to produce the play Jata
Durei Jai (However Far We Travel) for its centenary celebration.
After the event, the participants wanted to continue their
training in performing arts.
The challenge to present the cast on stage is immense since
space management is a problem. To solve this, the directors
use ropes to separate the stage and the wings. When the actors
step on the rope they know that it is the entrance to the
stage. Gangopadhyay says that even though the members cannot
see, they can smell, hear and touch-three elements inherent
to any theater. "At Blind Opera we believe that the blind
can see. That is, they see in their own way, if not in our
way, with the help of these abilities."
Gangopadhyay believes that, for the visually impaired, theater
is the best medium for _expression of their creative urges.
"They respond instinctively; they cannot copy anyone
else because they cannot see. Their body language tells the
story and hence it is very spontaneous."
The cast of Blind Opera challenges the audience too-to judge
them on their merits and not condescendingly. In the beginning
there was apprehension even among the founders: were the productions
going to be considered "artistic," or remain just
"productions"? To their credit, the members have
earned kudos from Calcutta audiences. All the members take
part in the productions, no one is left out and it is very
democratic.
However, when they conceived the idea of such a group, the
foursome did not visualize it as just a performing arts troupe.
Though artistic qualities were given due importance, the focus
was more on "drama therapy" through which they could
communicate better with the world around them.
For the members of the troupe, discovering the language of
the body is in a way also a journey of the persona. Coming
from diverse backgrounds but bound together by the same disability,
they have found an outlet for their creativity through the
plays. They do not feel isolated anymore because they can
relate to their fellow performers. As Debashish Das, 18, a
partially blind boy, says: "I had to leave my studies
after the school finals. I was sitting around at home, doing
nothing. Now I feel useful. I belong." It also has a
therapeutic effect because their confidence grows as they
are able to reach out to the sighted audiences. Marzina Khatun,
mother of a young child, echoes the feelings of others when
she says they build a bridge between the "seeing"
world and the dark world of their own.
They sing, they dance, and they experience joy. The joy of
being able to communicate, both at the personal level and
to the audience, is so great that they do not mind coming
from afar to the venue in the evening, even traveling two
to three hours in crowded buses and trains. Sometimes during
rehearsals, they stay late.
Blind Opera does not stand isolated from other disabled groups,
either. Since 2000, it has been organizing Pratibondhi o Prantik
Natyotsav, a theater festival of the disabled and marginal.
"By the marginal," says Pramanik, "we mean
those discarded or ignored by society, like street kids, children
of sex workers, etc., who do not get an opportunity to perform
on a common platform."
One day of the festival is marked as a paan-supari utsav
(betel nut festival). On this day, different groups exchange
the traditional symbols of friendship, an effort at bridge-building
within the community.
There is also a greater purpose behind it: to use theater
to build a community and mainstream the huge number of disabled
living in isolation. Together they can be a force to demand
better facilities in public life. For instance, members of
the group attended a December 2004 presentation at the American
Center in which Elizabeth Kahn of Arts Access in Raleigh,
North Carolina, demonstrated the technologies of audio description,
a narrative service that attempts to describe images of theater,
film, television and other art forms so that the visually
impaired can enjoy them. Without such help, a blind person
can experience theater only through the whispered asides of
a sighted companion. Pramanik also believes that blind children
should enter the mainstream from the beginning and take part
in as many physical activities as possible. "Often, parents
hide away a child with a disability or don't give as much
attention. If you suddenly want a grown-up boy to play football,
for example, he cannot because by that time his body is too
sedentary and he cannot respond."
Blind Opera members organize drama therapy workshops and
teach in the blind schools in West Bengal, linking isolated
groups or individuals. The Government of India's education
department supports this project. The second generation of
directors is coming up, Gangopadhyay says proudly. Lead actor
Subhas Dey, who is blind, has directed Aleek Dristi (Divine
Vision). His next production is Waiting for Godot. "Together
they will carry forward the movement, and we, the initiators,
will be in the background," Gangopadhyay says.
The big dream of the group is to establish a Natya Vidyalay,
a drama school following the ideal of Tagore's Santiniketan,
offering a platform for creative _expression of the disabled
and marginal-all those who are economically and socially forced
to stay in the periphery. Like Chumki Pal, they all dream
in color.
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