Natya Chetana, a troupe comprising a total of 25 member artists (18 men and seven women) from rural and tribal Odisha performed at various places, auditoria and festivals in the State and West Bengal from December 17 to December 20. The aim was to maintain a continuous relationship with West Bengal by involving rural artists and non-artists to create neat and professional standard plays. This was a record setting programme for Natya Chetana, so also for Odisha, that a play from Odisha went to 10 different places mostly in West Bengal to perform in different national and international theatre festivals.
The team left Natya Gram, after a well done rehearsal camp since November 8 last. The troupe was guided by playwright and director Subodh Patnaik. The specialty of the play was that it was meant for city audiences with a concept of “Intimate Theatre” as named by Natya Chetana, but not had the usual bamboo structure on stage as set design. The attempt was to share the innovative compositions which had been used in different plays carried to villages by cycle expeditions.
The compositions were unique such as getting a politician on a jeep to a remote village area to give a speech to the public, making a dam project implemented through machineries, chasing a fisherman by an engine-driven boat in a lake, establishing a character of two heads to project multinational company, holding towels on head giving shape of many cottages, blasting the mountain by pumping dynamites, cock fighting as a mode of gambling in tribal villages, using puppetry in a frame to project impact of TV, a child hiding from his father climbing a big tree to escape from being child-labour, use of a machine gun as principal hand-prop made out of bamboo, murder of a man and putting the dead body inside a well, later, thrown in a lake and tribal people leaving their villages by train .
The audiences could not resist themselves from clapping at those points of innovation in using body as main instruments. The play was based on case studies collected in 2005 nearby Koraput and was being created in a camp of two months in Sunabeda. The play raises questions about the possibility of poverty eradication through industrialisation. Whether the villages should turn into townships and the people would live happily.
Director Subodh Patnaik was awarded Rishikesh Chattopadhya Smruti Samman by a 42- year- old theatre group named Gobardanga Rupantar.
