About the Show:

Strange Fruit is a Dance Theatre against the strategic violence towards marginalized communities within India and rest of the world. Performance, dance, music, theatre is our celebration and tool to carry forward the voice of dissent. Our bodies and music make the language of this dance theatre. This show on 11th is a digital performance of Strange Fruit. The show is a play of dance with the camera. It is between Dance and Film. The moving camera is the eye to the performance: following every breath, every glance, every muscle. Going through moments of calm, fight and carnival, we have Strange Fruit. The performance is about the voice of the people and the environment we live in which is being eroded by fascist forces. This is collaboration with XR Affinity Network of Asia (XRANA), a community dedicated towards challenging the corporatization of indigenous land and communities. XRANA, an integral member of the umbrella XRISN is dedicated towards highlighting the need to tackle Environmental and Climate Change head on, speaking loudly about the equal rights of Mother Earth and its indigenous people.

The ticket sales of the show will go towards assisting theatre workers, performers, dancers who have been badly hit in West Bengal since the Covid Lockdown and the super cyclone Amphan. It is this bulk of performers on whose labour the cultural and art practices of Bengal thrive. This assistance will be a way to mobilize the performers’ community so that they can continue to sustain within their profession and keep their art practice alive.

About the Play (STRANGE FRUIT)

Strange Fruit is being performed since 2016. It is now an ensemble of dancers, musicians, theatricians, light designers, camera persons, friends and family.

Strange Fruit is a dance theatre supported by live music. It is inspired by the poem “Strange Fruit” (1937) authored by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym 'Lewis Allan', as a protest against the lynching of Black people in America. The trail of this history is found alive in the present times and it exists in different forms within people of other cultures and countries. The work also draws its inspiration from the iconic Black choreographer-dancer-anthropologist Pearl Primus' reimagination of the poem in her work Strange Fruit (1943). It questions and depicts the strategic violence inflicted on marginalised bodies. The oppressor and the oppressed reside inside the performers' bodies resulting in a dialectical relationship between the dancers and the characters they portray. Through a text which is completely physical and sound-oriented, the ensemble points at the blind influence of Brahminical fanaticism which has become normalized within the country.

Dance:

Resistance, love, and solidarity is depicted through a rarified mix of tenderness and rage completed by the performance relying on the bodies of the female dancer-actors, along with the music played by the musicians. Apart from contemporary dance – a veritable genre of movement that borrows from martial arts, contemporary techniques, sports routine and theatre -- the choreography is inspired by contemporary lived life. Strange Fruit continuously challenges the pre-meditated principles developed within the world of contemporary dance by constantly looking for unexplored sources of movement and physical expression. Finally, the performance rests on the bodies of three women who go on a journey to explore a feminist perspective in physicality: through movement and body.

Music:

The music in Strange Fruit is strongly inspired by the sound of the underground, alternative, people’s cultures found across the world. The performance unfolds as the musicians carry the narrative forward along with the dancers. The music oscillates between sound, harmony, and noise. The cacophony of everyday, urban lives inspire the lissome movement of music in the work. Engaged in a constant dialogue, the musicians respond to the physical expression of the dancers. Instruments such as Djembe, Violin, Ukulele, Darbuka are used to invoke a soundscape of the community emblematic of the people’s cultures heard across borders.

Theatre:

The work borrows from various theatrical devices and incorporates them into the language of dance. The work lies outside the verbose tradition of mainstream Bengali theatre and seeks to create theatricality through physical and musical exertion. Communicating the socio-political context of the piece is played out in the form of an emotional journey which, we believe, is possible through the process of theatre-making.

Cast and Crew

Dancers: Sampritee Ghatak, Sabita Kashyap

Musicians: Sayantan Ghosh, Saptak Sarkar

Lights: Janmejoy Haldar

Tech Team: Sayantan Ghosh, Bambi (Archisman Mukherjee), Saptak Sarkar, Sampritee Ghatak

Camera: Arjab Sarkar, Malini Malini Chakrabarty

Online Editor: Bambi (Archisman Mukherjee)

Production: Sreyashi Mazumdar, Shibaditya Das Sharma

Creative Design: Deepshikha Bose, Senjuti Das, Sanno Singh, Debarati Sarkar

PR: Naina Punwani

Venue partner: Impulse Studios, Sumana Nag.

Choreography: Satakshi Nandy and Strange Fruit Family

Strange Fruit Family: Aritry Das, Priyam Bose, Soumidipa Mondal, Dibyokamal Mitra, Sayan Sinha, Agnitray Chakroborty, Sadhana Singh, Babun Chakroborty, Subhankar Dey, Utsarjana Mutsuddi, Rusha Bose

Collaborators: XRANA, XRISN, Sumana Nandi of XRANA

About XR Affinity Network of Asia (XRANA):

XRANA are 15 Pan-Asian Environmental Justice Activists from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines supported by like-minded friends from Africa and Abya Yala (Latin America) who are seriously committed to building XRANA as part of XRISN.

They are challenging corporate extractivist destruction of our environment and abuses of human, peoples’ and Mother Earth rights and highlighting the need for declaration of Climate and Ecological Emergency in order to more seriously tackle Climate Change with appropriate participatory democratic forms of people’s self-empowering creativity.

XRANA uphold Pluriversality and encourage the Cognitive Justice appreciation of the need for all communities to utilise the best of their own knowledge as germane to the indigenous knowledge systems for genuine sustainable Development.

They are supporting Communities of Resistance to stop being dispossessed of their homelands and work together with all those willing to reclaim land, to protest against mining and extractivist plunder, destruction of Biodiversity, reclaiming land for organic farming, opposing racial, gender, sex, caste, class and other forms of discrimination and promoting Eco-Justice education and new ways of environmentally just living in Equity, solidarity and friendship with all others.