Eye on detail: Sanchayan Ghosh with his Light of Darkness installation. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Director, actor and playwright Bratya Basu, who enjoys flouting conventions with novel and daring schemes, is going West. He has been selected to represent India at a US government-sponsored annual conference on Tolerance through Art.

“There will be representation from 22 countries like Austria, Turkey, Columbia, Croatia, etc. The conference will be held for a month at five centres — Washington, New York, Seattle, Philadelphia and Austin,” said Basu.

“I have been asked to speak on religious and racial intolerance in our country, but I also intend to focus on our long history of political intolerance,” he said. “I will speak on Shotoroi July and my other plays and films,” said Basu. His recent play, Krishnagauvar, touches upon sexual intolerance and homosexuality.

And what does he expect from this conference? “A healthy exchange of ideas between creative people from all over the world. Some theatre, Broadway, Jazz,” laughed Basu.

The dark light

Sanchayan Ghosh has often negotiated with ease the gap between set designing and installation.

With over 50 stage designs to his credit, Ghosh is now making a 45 ft x14 ft installation called Light of Darkness.

It will be part of the Durham Enlightenment Festival, an international light-based arts festival in the UK.

There are three other participants — Julie Westerman, Lulu Quinn and Nandita Palchoudhury. Ghosh has been assigned the Framwell Gate Bridge on the Weir river.

“Durham has tales of the blind Reverend Bede, who could move rocks and trees with his sermons and miners whose deaths no one remembers,” Ghosh said.

Treating the 80 ft arch of the bridge as a visage, he has fabricated a pair of giant eyes in red, yellow and blue. Red LED cables are used for the outline and the pupils are created by assembling yellow miner’s helmets with lights. In the centre of each eye is a network of blue phosphorous-coated cables that will glow when the surrounding lights are on.