Theatre production
Ribon Khandokar attended the first creative alternatives workshop in Dhaka and was inspired to transform her theatre company, Tannisho Natuya, to produce more independent politically conscious theatre. “We launched our journey of art and activism only with our positive energy and our pocket money…we chose two scripts; one is “ Letter to Child Never Born” and “Urthiri- The Component”.
“Letter to a Child Never Born (Lettera a un bambino mai nato, 1975) is a novel by Italian author and journalist Oriana Fallaci. It is written as a letter by a young professional woman to the fetus which she carries in utero. It is assumed that Fallaci describes her own sufferings through this letter. It details the woman's struggle to choose between a career she loves and an unexpected pregnancy, explaining how life works with examples of her childhood, and warning him/her about the unfairness of the world.
This gripping tale is undeniably fiction, for it includes dream sequences as well as an imagined dialog with the child ("Child"). It may not have happened in real life but everybody believes that most of the events depicted really happened. And there is nothing very unusual about those events: A young career woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, determines to carry the child to term, but miscarries. What makes it so memorable is the way Fallaci illuminates the inner life of the young woman — who swings from hope to fear, the loving support for the nascent life conflicting with her drive to maintain her career, which she also loves, the nagging guilt in the end that her pursuit of that career led to the miscarriage, and her responses to the external pressures on her.”
“Uthiri is a one actor play in 4 acts which follows the anguished voice of a forest dweller uprooted from his birth-scape and thrown into the city to fend for himself. Caught in the treacherous mines of media and pseudo sophistication the forester finds himself a marginal lumpen or merely a component unable to fit into the city machine. He is a working component of the earth’s order of nature and he upholds values of honesty and dignity. The performance is a strong physical theatre infused with aboriginal music and native Tamil sounds. The performance attempts to place the human body as a component of the land and its nature and to talk about the loss of traditional food which also served as medicine and a way of life where humans and nature could co-exist and where everyone had a chance to live with dignity.”
“{For the} last 17 years I have been working with many NGOs and through theatre and documentary film making I try to execute their thought and vision and mission. Sometimes their thought closely relates to my moral thought, sometimes I only do the work for consultancy and money...The most interesting part about receiving the contact from the Action Aid Global Platform and the Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York is that they never try to impose on our creative work; they gave us full freedom to do whatever we want.”