Our staff
Dr Sudipto Chatterjee
Tel: +44 01509 222952
Role: Senior Lecturer in Drama
Email: S.Chatterjee@lboro.ac.uk
Room NN.1.28, Martin Hall Building, East Park
Publications
I received my PhD in Performance Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, under the guidance of Prof. Richard Schechner. After teaching in the United States at Tufts University (Boston) and University of California, Berkeley, I have come to Loughborough with specialisations in the fields of Asian and Asian-American performance and film, post-colonial performance, modern and contemporary performance theory. My book, The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta, won the Michael Kirby Memorial Prize for Best Dissertation in 1998 and has been published by Seagull (London, New York and Calcutta). My Bengali book of plays, Abhiropan, was published in 2005 from Calcutta. Currently, I am finishing my third book, Myths, Masses, & Movements, on Indian popular theatres, forthcoming from Routledge. My articles include pieces in Theatre and Imperialism (ed. J. Ellen Gainor), (Post)Colonial Stages (ed. Helen Gilbert), Shakespeare and Appropriation (eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer) and most recently, Not the Other Avant Garde (eds. James Harding and John Rouse). My translation of the ancient Sanskrit play, The Little Clay Cart, by Shudraka, is featured in the recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Drama. I have also been published in major theatre journals like The Drama Review and Theater Journal.
Beyond academic writing, I am also an author of fifteen plays and translations in Bengali and English and also an actor/director. In 1999, I was awarded the New York Drama Circle Award of Distinction for translation and direction of Nuraldeen's Lifetime (by Bangladeshi playwright, Syed Shamsul Haq), a bilingual production in Bengali and English. I directed Girish Karnad's Hayavadana and The Playboy of the Western World at Tufts University, as well as Badal Sircar's Bhoma at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002, I directed Birpurus, my own Bengali adaptation of Playboy..., in Kolkata, India. For ten years, I was the Artistic Director of Epic Actors' Workshop in New York.
In addition to theatre, I am also a filmmaker. In 1997, I made Free To Sing?, a feature length documentary on the Bengali musician, Kabir Suman, that has been screened at various international venues. Recently, I have also completed a new documentary, Epic Women, on the Pandvani solo-performers of Chhattisgarh in Central India. In 2005, I directed Manjula Padmanabhan's Harvest at UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies. I have also written and performed in the solo-performance of Man of the Heart, directed by Suman Mukherjee. This production originated at University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and was presented by East Coast Artists in New York in April-May 2006. Man of the Heart has also been performed in Irvine, CA and in India.