Rosalie Purvis, a PhD student in the Department of , directed and starred in a cross-cultural adaptation of José Rivera’s play The Winged Man in January 2018.
Purvis collaborated with the Kolkata-based theatre company Chaepani, whose aim is to share stories across cultural boundaries to foster a sense of community. Purvis previously worked with Chaepani on Root Map, a play about migration staged on several international borders, including the Mexico–United States border.
“I felt like, without realizing it, I had waited my whole career to meet these people, halfway across the globe,” said Purvis.
Following their collaboration on Root Map, Purvis shared Rivera’s play with Chaepani members Debashish Sen Sharma and Dr. Debaroti Chakraborty. Purvis, while delighted to work with Chaepani again, was surprised when they asked her to play the lead role, a teenage girl pregnant with the mythical Winged Man’s baby. Chakraborty had rewritten the story to be about an adult, unmarried woman who is living with her mother, which would provide a similar framework in West Bengal as teen pregnancy does in the United States.
Dr. Debaroti Chakraborty narrating her script in the first rehearsal.
Purvis recalled the day Chakraborty presented her adaptation to the company: “She began her narration in English. Over the course of her narrative, more and more Bangla crept in. By the end of the workshop, the entire conversation took place in Bangla. Actors had tears in their eyes. We were hugging one another. I only know a few words in Bangla, but it didn’t matter. We understood one another.”
The finished piece included minimal dialogue, relying instead on movement, music, and shadow imagery. The movement-centric approach ensured that the play’s themes of motherhood, desire, and finding and losing love were universally understood.
Cornell PMA PhD student Rosalie Purvis in a performance of The Winged Man.
“Chaepani is a truly intergenerational community—like a family. Company members often come to support rehearsals even if they are not performing in the play. In fact, one of the most helpful artists to me in my process was a ten-year-old company member named Muku,” said Purvis. “She came to most rehearsals and was there to cheer me on and brush my hair and even comfort me when I shed some tears after an emotional scene of releasing the winged baby my character births so that he can fly away.”
In addition to working on The Winged Man, Purvis and Chakraborty taught a workshop at the Jadavpur University and expanded their project “Now That Separateness Is Unassailable.” The piece is about two women who live on different continents and their struggle to bridge the cultural, geographic, and linguistic distance between them. Purvis performed an excerpt of the piece with Chakraborty’s portion projected onto a screen at last semester’s Mini Locally Grown Dance in Cornell’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.
Julian Robison '20 is a communications assistant for the Department of .
