Ratan Thiyam's twenty five-year-old Chorus Repertory Theatre will be making its American debut this fall, touring the epic play, Uttar-Priyadarshi, to seven theaters across the country, opening at the Kennedy Center and closing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Uttar-Priyadarshi will be one of the featured works at Intersections II at New WORLD Theater in September.

Thiyam was born into an artistic family, his father was a guru of the Rasleela, religious dance form, and his mother was a noted dancer. Thiyam studied western theater at India's National School of Drama in Delhi, before returning to Manipur, further studying classical and traditional performance forms and founding the Chorus Repertory in 1976 to create contemporary theater work. His company has been featured at major international festivals including the Avignon festival in France, the Mitsui festival in Japan and the Adelaide festival in Australia.

Last spring, New WORLD Theater's Artistic Director, Roberta Uno, was invited to be part of a US group traveling to Manipur, India, to meet Thiyam and launch discussions of a possible tour. The following is excerpted from an interview conducted by Uno with Thiyam in April of 1999.

ROBERTA UNO: We were talking about Brecht ... In reading articles about you, the term "epic theater" keeps coming up and elsewhere your work is described as a "theater of violence,"What do you call it? Are these terms adequate?

RATAN THIYAM: I cannot really think of Brecht in, you know, in more than the theoretical aspect of talking about a kind of theater, a kind of acting style. It is the quality of his approaches, the philosophy of expression where Brecht would find similarities (to my theater.) In fact, take any of the traditional theater forms in India, and they will always remind you of Brecht in that sense.

RU: Do you think that's why certain theorists, Meyerholdt and Brecht, for example looked to the East to see some of what they were thinking theoretically, actually done?

RT: Yes, but that's why I hesitate really to become a part of an "ism" you see, I don't know really know what it (my theater) should be called. What "ism" is it really? "Ism," always reminds me of philosophers who have not yet written it down. I mean they don't belong to any "ism" but yet afterwards it is named and then connected through some of the "isms" and that is very, very Western. What I can call my method has no manifesto. And one particular question, which comes always in my mind, is that even if I write all my methods, is it really possible to make theater with what I have written down? That is a big question mark for me. Is it really possible? And if not, isn't it very limited then?

You know I have passed through many, many phases. I experimented with one phase in my life for ten years. That was the inter-reaction between traditional performing art forms and the contemporary theater. After that I wanted to find out the real essence of the tradition and also the real essence of the contemporary theater. It's been about climbing stair after stair.

RU: Something about your work that is so interesting to me is that it is so informed by a cultural base, like when you showed us the traditional dances and drumming, and the environment that informs the work -- many Western artists consciously search for that type of theatricality to stimulate their work.

RT: and make it a device...

RU: yes, it's a device.

RT: And that is where the danger lies. It is not a child's game, you see, where you can put something from tradition, you take some elements from tradition, some rituals from tradition. I realized that now I will have to create my rituals, my tradition -- my own tradition.

RU: ...and in terms of "authentic" performance....

RT: I purposely broke the tradition and then created my own tradition but that was not sufficient again.... I was becoming more and more interested in many layers of interpretation, on different levels. And that is when the words became less important. For an actor the words may be very, very important but I say, no. You see, the word cannot travel properly, and reach the inner ear. Even our ear has its inner level that is the mind. We have to think about another person inside, who has another ear, another nose, another mouth, another taste and so on, and the external appearances vanish. To touch that level, to touch those two circles, one is the outer circle and one is the inner circle, it is like the explosion of a volcano. And the volcanic eruption is more important for me than the result of the volcanic eruption afterwards where it creates havoc. To me, it is about the volcanic eruption taking place inside, making a kind of sound which is not able to be heard by other people; it can be only taken in by people who are really interested in knowing. And I believe in audience -- that there must be some audiences who will be aiming for those kinds of situations and not only the external kind of thing.

RU: Let's turn for a moment to the themes of the two works of yours that I saw, Chakravyuha and Uttar-Priyadarshi, the second of which will tour the US. These are two huge plays -- I'm not referring only to the number of actors and scale of production, but the theme of war that is so enormous. Both plays deal with violence and enlightenment but the second moves to the realm of addressing the impact on women.

RT: There are many facets of war. War can effect children, the whole generation, war can effect women, making them prostitutes, and not even prostitutes, put them in a prison cell and then rape them night after night and not allow them to have an abortion. At that point it is a war which will go to the next generation. You see it is not really normal, so if the situation becomes so big how can we expect a generation to think normally as a human being?

RU: When there is so much violence --

RT: When there is so much violence. And that is where I told myself that I am a victim of all this war and there is something, if I am a small theater worker and my expression is through theater, I can carry out my expression. I don't claim there should be this and that solution. But until and unless we go on knocking the door, the man behind the door won't open the door. So we have to open the faculties of the people, even those who are violent enough to wipe out the human civilization and a beautiful place called the world, the earth. It is really a big concern personally with me.