Archive: Arts & Entertainment

"Root Map," an international theater collaboration about borders and migration, will have a one-time-only performance on Thursday, March 2, at 8 p.m. in Cornell University's Barnes Hall.

The international collaboration includes academics and artists with diverse cultural heritages across Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and South America; the international cast includes actors from Cornell and Kolkata, India. The solution to having writers and actors on separate continents was simple: hold meetings and rehearsals via Skype.

The play is an ensemble piece, interweaving stories from different cultures to explore the similarities people experience when encountering borders.

"All the stories were firsthand or from family," said Rosalie Purvis, a doctoral student in the Department of Performing and Media Arts in Cornell's College of Arts & Sciences, who served as primary writer of the play in Ithaca. "We kept finding more and more commonalities in the tropes and images even though our experiences were in different landscapes and cultures."

The stories are deeply personal. Purvis is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and grew up partly in the Netherlands; her extended family now includes indigenous Africans and Asians. Carolina Osorio Gil, Latina/o Studies Program engagement coordinator and director of the ¡CULTURA! Ithaca program, came to the U.S. from Colombia when she was 4, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally (she is now a citizen). For Indian collaborators Debaroti Chakraborty and Debasish Sen Sharma, the Bangladesh border is a short car drive away.

"We all have a different experience but crossing borders is a shared aesthetic," Purvis said.

There was so much overlap in the stories, the collaborators say they can't remember whose story is whose. For example, one scene involves a cow at the border, reflecting three different stories shared during the writing process.

Osorio Gil described the goal of the production as "playing with and across borders together." The idea, she said, is that borders are arbitrary. "People don't cross borders, borders cross people."

"Root Map" had its inaugural performance Jan. 27 in Kolkata, to be followed by the March 2 Ithaca performance and a March 4 show in El Paso, Texas. The performance in India was the first time all the collaborators met in person. The Indian performance also featured local actors from the Chaepani theater collective and a soundtrack created by Indian musicians.

Because the play incorporates nine different languages, the soundtrack was an important component of the production, said Debra Castillo, who is director of the Latina/o Studies Program, the Emerson Hinchliff Chair of Hispanic Studies and a professor of comparative literature.

"Our goal for the play is for it to supersede language," Purvis said. "In migration we're all exposed to languages we don't understand, so the audience will encounter words they don't understand and that's an important part of the experience." Meaning is communicated through music, gesture and emotion, she added.

In each new location where the play is performed, new languages may be added as new actors are added, said Castillo. For example, in El Paso, some actors from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, will join the performance.

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