Sudipto Chatterjee

Sudipto Chatterjee

Type
Assistant Professor Fellow
Department
Theater, Dance & Performance Studies
2004-05

Assistant Professor Sudipto Chatterjee, a specialist in Asian performance in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, is planning to complete part of a book entitled Indian Popular Theatres: Masses, Myths, and Movements, contracted to Routledge in the series “Theatres of the World,” edited by John Russell Brown. This book will fill a void in theater studies, where work on Indian theater has typically focused on classical dramatic texts or urban theaters. It will provide a much-needed analysis of popular theatrical traditions in India, allowing for an understanding of the cultural surroundings immediately producing and framing those traditions and giving a sense of how the performance is experienced, understood, and retained by its audience. Singling out four representative traditions and performance sites, the study will endeavor, as Chatterjee puts it, “to pry open the mechanics of the audience-performer-performed circuitry that goes into the making of these living traditions.”