Polash Larsen

Hi my name’s Polash and I’m a Bengali-Australian theatre artist living in Melbourne.



At the start of this year I directed a play at La Mama in Melbourne called ‘In the Middle of the Night’. We’d adapted some short stories by the Bengali Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore into a one-man show. On the back of that I was asked to contribute to a project in Kolkata called Tramjatra.



So what’s a “Tramjatra”?

Well the word Jatra means ‘journey’ but the activity is a uniquely Bengali kind of performance that happens in open spaces, incorporates all sorts of folk music, dance and performance traditions, and generally adapts itself to whatever’s on the minds of people at the time. It might have evolved in the Bengali rural hinterlands in the 1500’s but today’s Jatras cover topics as wide ranging as the London bombings, 9/11, the war in Iraq with a liberal dash of what’s current in Bollywood and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

So a Tramjatra is all of this – but on the Kolkata trams.



So where do I come in?

You might not know this but Kolkata – like Melbourne is one of the world’s great ‘Tram Cities’. My job is to bring my knowledge of Australian theatre – and maybe even Australian tram-based theatre to create a uniquely hybrid Australian-Indian jatra.



And next year we might even be able to bring the work back from Kolkata to Melbourne.



But in the meantime I need a bit of help just GETTING to India!

The biggest risks here are artistic and personal.

Kolkata is a tough old place and also one of the world's most crowded cities but beyond that it's also the spiritual home of Bengalis everywhere. Furthermore - I'm the worst sort of Bengali there is! I'm someone who can't speak the language. In addition to this I'm someone who's planning to go over there and mess around with the legacy of their most important cultural figure, the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

I could get in a lot of trouble...

It's going to take all of the skills, endurance and experience I've developed over the last twenty years for me to pull this off without offending everyone and being hounded out of the country.

But it's worth the risk!