Ratan Thiyam and his 26-member Chorus Repertory Theatre from Manipur, India, whose North American debut of Uttar-Priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude) dazzled American audiences in 2000, return to the U.S. in the fall of 2006 with a new production, Nine Hills One Valley (Chinglon Mapan Tampak Ama), a haunting and powerful theatrical allegory that confronts the turmoil that consumes Thiyam’s native land today.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, this world-renowned theater company, which has toured in over 30 countries, will open its 5-week U.S. tour with two New York City-area engagements – at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s NEXT WAVE Festival in New York, October 11-14, and at Newark’s New Jersey Performing Arts Center on October 15.  Other hosts include Carolina Performing Arts in Chapel Hill (NC), the Lied Center of Kansas in Lawrence; the Mondavi Center at UC Davis, and Cal Performances at UC Berkeley. The tour is co-produced by Asia Society and Lisa Booth Management and is made possible, in part, with support from the Indian Council for Foreign Relations and the Ford Foundation.

Writer, director, composer, designer, painter and actor Ratan Thiyam is considered one of the most important and influential theater-makers on the international performance scene. In October of 2000, the New York Times critic Margo Jefferson hailed Ratan Thiyam as a “genius” and the “experience of seeing Uttar-Priyadarshi transcendent.” She wrote, “We need theatre that joins history to ritual, and not because ritual should transcend history, but because ritual can transform it. You can witness this transformation if you are lucky enough to see Ratan Thiyam’s Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur.”

Performed by a cast of 26, Nine Hills One Valley premiered in October 2005 in New Delhi, India.  A haunting and poetic theatrical allegory, the production confronts the turmoil that consumes Manipur, India today. In the face of violence, venality, instability and poverty, Thiyam asks, how do we sustain ourselves when our cultural traditions are cut off, lost? The work’s title describes the natural beauty of Manipur and its geography.  Bordered by Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma, this culturally rich and politically unsettled region is a hill-state of North-East India.

Nine Hills One Valley is “a poem by birth, a collage of many ideas without a conventional plot,” says Thiyam. “It depicts what I see and what I feel about various systems which ultimately lead a place and its people to many difficult problems. It is a document of a restless society and political turmoil where the sufferers are only the common people.” 

As Nine Hills One Valley begins, seven wise men, Maichous, carriers of history and culture, are suddenly jolted from eternal slumber by nightmares. Sons run from a barrage of bullets, desperately seeking the safety of their mothers’ arms. Time, a howling demon, disfigures the sacred dancers of the Raas Lila. Atrocities are reduced to ephemeral headlines in day-old newspapers that fill the stage raising questions on the issues and problems of modern world and people of this century. 

What is happening to their progeny, the people of Manipur? Reluctantly, the Maichous return to write new Puyas — books of wisdom and seek out principals of justice, equality, governance, loyalty, homeland, and obligation. They call for the liberation of the mind from the tyranny and oppression of stagnation, but most of all they urge us to look deeply within our souls to find the key to end the restlessness that has enveloped our societies. At the end of Nine Hills One Valley, mothers sing lullabies to console their children. Lamps are lit on the hilltops and in the valley to remind the people of their past glory and petition for the return of peace now lost. 

In his review of the work, critic Gowri Ramnarayan of Frontline (India) wrote, “Thiyam’s visual spectacles have always been unrivalled...Panoramic, colourful, always global, shining with ideals, the new production has all these attributes. It has something more. That `something' arises from the fact that Nine Hills relies less on pageantry and more on poetry. It has epic sweep but also becomes as personal as a sonnet. It billows into a universal lament, and warning.”

Meticulously crafted, Nine Hills One Valley is rich in visual imagery that reference traditional crafts and performing and martial arts. Importantly, as much as it directly reflects Manipur, the production transcends the immediacy of place, language and aesthetics to speak across cultural and geographic borders. For Thiyam, this perspective is not a matter of choice; it is the reality of contemporary life:

“I’ll tell you, this is the condition of modern man: that you live somewhere, but you are compelled to think about the world – because you cannot be separated, or stand aloof from the problems of the world. The sufferings I am facing in this small place are not different from what is happening elsewhere. Suppose oil is burning in Kuwait or in Iraq; that does not mean that I will not suffer because I am in another corner of the globe. Sitting in Manipur, I think about the Gaza Strip, I think about Israel or Palestine, or America, about Afghanistan, about Pakistan and its relationship with India, Kashmir, bomb blasts in Bali. Globalization impinges on your own identity as a modern man and also on your native identity.”

Chorus Repertory Theatre was established by Ratan Thiyam in April 1976. Located on the outskirts of Imphal, Manipur’s capitol city, Chorus Repertory Theater’s two-acre campus has been slowly built (and six-times rebuilt after disastrous monsoons) to accommodate a self-sufficient way of life, with housing and working quarters for the company. Its centerpiece is a stunning 300-seat auditorium conceived and designed by Thiyam with space for set construction and storage. Called The Shrine, it is now an important regional and national center for contemporary theater.

The company has performed throughout India, and appeared at major international festivals including those in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, Dublin, Avignon, Perth, Adelaide, Bogotá, Rome, Cervantino, Mitsui, and Toga.  Chorus Repertory Theatre has also performed in London and Paris, Bangkok and Taipei, and toured countries including Greece, the former USSR, Holland, Cuba, Peru, Bangladesh, Japan, France, Australia, Switzerland, Brazil, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Germany. The Company made its USA debut in 2000.  A major retrospective of Thiyam’s work with Chorus Repertory Theatre, featuring at least six fully mounted plays will be held in Pune, India in December 2006.