'Vichitra' by Theatre Alumnus Shayok Misha Chowdhury '16 to be Produced at The Bushwick Starr
Vichitra by Theatre alumnus Shayok Misha Chowdhury ’16, an episodic, audiovisual project, will be produced at The Bushwick Starr this winter. Chowdhury’s Vichitra is “the fourth installment of an experiment in queer South Asian imagination,” where “Carnatic classical music is the shapeshifting protagonist.” The project has also been commissioned by Ars Nova, HERE Arts Center, Joe’s Pub, The India Center Foundation, Dixon Place, National Queer Theater, and Paper Moth Media.
A Brooklyn-based queer Bengali director, writer, and creator, Chowdhury “looks to performance as the art of collaborative, embodied inquiry.” He is a Resident Artist at HERE Arts Center, a member of BRIClab and The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, a former Resident Director at The Flea and The Drama League, and an alumnus of Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, and the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab.
Chowdury is part of the musical duo Grill and Chowder, with composer Laura Grill Jaye. The pair’s automythography How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia has been performed at Joe’s Pub and Ars Nova’s ANT Fest. The Optics of Dying Light, a semi-finalist for the O'Neill's National Music Theater Conference, was first presented at HERE Arts Center and has since been developed at New York Theatre Workshop. The duo’s first joint project, Artemis in the Parking Lot, was awarded Best of Fest at NYMF’s 2016 Reading Series at Playwrights Horizons. With Matt Minnicino, they are developing Inhume: A Genesis Story, for which they were granted a Creative Residency at SPACE on Ryder Farm.
Chowdhury’s other credits include Lucas Baisch’s Dry Swallow (Brown University); Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves (Williams College); Nia Witherspoon’s The Messiah Complex (HERE Arts Center); Cherríe Moraga’s The Mathematics of Love (Stanford University); MAKE (The Hemispheric Institute’s 2016 Encuentro in Santiago, Chile); and an adaptation of O.Henry’s The Last Leaf (Barn Arts Collective). Additionally, he has been the recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, Kundiman, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and his poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Portland Review, Asian American Literary Review, Lantern Review, and elsewhere. Chowdhury was also a soloist on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns, which he performed in concert at Lincoln Center.
Chowdhury received his Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the School of the Arts under Anne Bogart, Brian Kulick, and Greg Mosher. He went on to study Lecoq-based physical theater at the London International School of Performing Arts, and he has since taught and directed at Stanford, Brown, NYU Tisch, CalArts, Fordham, Syracuse, and Williams.