Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Cross-Cultural Performance and Talk – May 2, Sylvania Campus

Megan Savage

Visiting international theater artists and scholars Rosalie Purvis and Dr. Debarati Chakraborty perform their project “Now That Separateness Is Unassailable,” about two women who live on different continents and their struggle to bridge the cultural, geographic, and linguistic distance between them. Purvis and Chakraborty will also discuss their work sharing stories across cultural boundaries to foster a sense of community.

Performance and Talk: May 2, 11am-12:30pm, Little Theater “Now that Separateness is Unassailable” A 30-minute multimedia dance theatre performance (followed by a talk) that deconstructs the borders that separate loved ones. In their desperate longing to breach the cultural and geographic separations that divide them, two women from opposite ends of the globe bend time with the warmth of love they share. “Now that Separateness is Unassailable” is a collaboration between dancer/scholar Rosalie Purvis and Debarati Chakraborty of the Kolkata based performing arts Collective Chaepani. The two will discuss past collaborative projects including “Root Map,” a play created and performed with local artists on multiple international borders, addressing and crossing politically imposed obstacles.

The work negotiates cultural difference and translation between the company’s respective urban surroundings of New York and Kolkata, revealing fundamentally different Eastern and Western attitudes about attachment, artifacts, and rituals of consumption. The artists explore the intimacy of intercultural relationship through dance, video and a layered audioscore that includes texts from Indian and Latin American literature, excerpts from Esther Perel’s podcast about relationships, pop songs from Sweden, France, Brazil and India, classical music from Switzerland and India, incorporated and manipulated into an original sound collage designed by James David Jacobs [of WETA]. Singer Somdutta Roi provides a haunting voice and movement score as her singing weaves through the piece, at times dividing, at times inspiring and then finally connecting the two women on stage.

The pieces has been performed in India in several venues in Kolkata. It has also been shown in India at Samsi College in Malda which is right near the Bangladesh border. In the U.S. the piece has been shown in Ithaca (NY), Philadelphia, Washington DC and Portland (OR).

Rosalie Purvis
(U.S.A., the Netherlands) holds a BA in Creative Writing and Dance (recipient: Ana Itelman Prize for Innovative Choreography) from Bard College and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Brooklyn College (Recipient fellowship for Theatre Teaching Excellence). Since 2000, she has worked as a freelance director, performer and choreographer in New York City where work has been featured at, among others, the Atlantic Theatre’s Second Stage, Theatre for the New City, the Brick Theatre, Dixon Place, the Estrogenius Festival, Teatro la Teo, Manhattan Theatre Source, the Culture Project, Teatro Circulo, the Henry Street Settlement, 59 East 59, the Abingdon Theatre, the Puerto Rican Traveling Company, Dance New Amsterdam, 78th Street Theatre Lab and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She has also created site-specific works in various spaces in Southern Vermont, NYC, Philadelphia, Ithaca and her native city of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Most recently, she joined Kolkata-based international performing arts collective Chaepani and together they have performed at various national borders such as El Paso (Texas), Akwesasne (Mohawk Nation near the U.S.A.-Canada border) and Malda (near the border of Bangladesh). She has taught acting, directing, dramaturgy, (site specific) performance composition, models of collaborative devising, script/libretto writing, movement, theatre history, creative and academic writing, most recently at Jadavpur University (Kolkata, India), the City University of New York, the CUNY Graduate Center’s Applied Theatre MA, the New York City Department of Health, Mercy College in the Bronx, the New York Institute of Technology, Lehman College, Pace University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, the Putney School Summer Program and Marlboro College where she served as guest director and professor of theatre arts in fall of 2014. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. studies at Cornell University in the Performing and Media Arts Department where she focuses on border studies and cross-cultural performance.

Dr. Debarati Chakraborty
(India), is a researcher, a Bharatnatyam dancer and a theatre practitioner based in Kolkata. Currently, she is a UGC-Senior Research Scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, India. Her research broadly studies women writing in India and Latin America through a comparative perspective in the context of borders. Debarati has received her honors degree in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University in 2007 and has been awarded with a gold medal for her Masters in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University in 2009. She is also teaching at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. Debarati is an instructor at the ‘Bodies at the Borders’ collaborative video-conferencing course between Cornell University, U.S.A and The Center for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures (CSLALC), Jadavpur University. She is working in the field of Performing Arts-in-Education, trying to practice it as an alternative mode of pedagogy. Debarati has taught acting, creative writing, dance and literature for the past ten years. She is one of the founding members of the Chaepani Arts Collective and performs and tours with them regularly. She toured various national border venues with Chaepani’s production “Root Map’. She recently adapted and translated “the Winged Man” by Jose Rivera. She and Rosalie Purvis performed in this adaptation to enthusiastic audiences in Kolkata in January, 2018. “Now that Separateness is Unassailable” is her fourth international collaboration with Rosalie Purvis.

For more information, contact Megan Savage: megan.savage1@pcc.edu