Goodbye, Chetan Datar
Shanta Gokhale
Wednesday, August 06, 2008 Mumbai Mirror
Where do you begin to mourn Chetan Datar’s death and where do you end? At 44, he was at the very peak of his career. In August last year, he was invited to Kolkata to do a play based on a Tagore text. He did Giribala, an experiment in using live music with dance to deepen the effect of the spoken word.Two months later he was in Bangalore, directing Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Holi, in Kannada, for the annual Rangashankara festival. In March this year he was in Kolkata attending a seminar on translation. In May he was in Delhi, directing Dr Chandrashekhar Phansalkar’s Ram Naam Satya Hai for the National School of Drama Repertory. He returned from Delhi with colitis. And that, tragically, turned out to be the beginning of his end.With Chetan Datar’s death, theatre has lost a fine writer, adapter and translator. His very first play, Savlya, still dwells hauntingly in the minds of those who saw it. Writing it was a test of Chetan’s tenacity and trust in his guru, Satyadev Dubey. In its first avatar, the play was a one-act sequence of four monologues. Dubey pushed Chetan into recreating it as a full length play. Then pushed him again into reworking it as Gaanth, the Hindi version.Although Savlya made people sit up and take notice of this introverted, soft-spoken, intense, self-effacing but stubborn young writer, Chetan did not write another original play for the next 12 years. Perhaps Savlya had squeezed him dry. Perhaps he needed to escape realism which appeared in those days to be his instinctive form of dramatic expression. Eager to explore theatre beyond its confines, he turned to direction.In Chetan’s death, theatre has lost a politically conscious director. Angered and pained at the ostrich-like attitude of the middle class in denying the realities of life, he translated and directed a fine production of Are There Tigers in the Congo? With this play, the Marathi audience was compelled to confront the issue of homosexuality for the first time.Ram Naam Satya Hai and Holi, directed by Chetan, both touched on this issue. His own play, 1, Madhav Baug, was about a mother’s coming to terms with her son’s sexuality.He opened up other vital contemporary issues with plays like his own Radha Vaja Ranade and Premanand Gajvi’s Gandhi ani Ambedkar which he directed for the mainstream in order to reach a wider audience.In Chetan’s death, theatre has lost a director who never stopped experimenting. For years, he collaborated with Kathak and Bharat Natyam dancers Rajashree Shirke and Vaibhav Arekar to explore the possibility of using classical dance in theatre, not as a decorative device, but as part of the text itself. First he did mythological stories with contemporary interpretations. Mata Hidimba was the most powerful in this series.But his real aim was to see if dance could be similarly used in a modern play. He chose Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Pratibimb for this experiment and turned it into the utterly beguiling dance drama, Haravalele Pratibimb.In Chetan’s death, theatre has lost a dedicated teacher and organiser. Young people who flocked to his acting workshops are now bereft. Bereft too is Awishkar, which Chetan helped the indefatigable Arun Kakade to bring back to vibrant life in a municipal school hall in Mahim. The monthly mini-festivals he organised there demonstrated his faith in cross-fertilisation between the arts and the languages.When Gowri Ramnarayan wanted to perform Dark Horse, based on Arun Kolatkar’s poetry, in Mumbai, Chetan made it happen at Awishkar despite financial constraints. When Usha Ganguli wanted to perform her one-woman play Antaryatra in Mumbai, again Chetan made it happen, despite similar constraints.A rich future lay ahead for Chetan Datar, and through him for theatre. Saturday saw that future turn into ashes.
[End]
No comments:
Post a Comment