Shayok Misha Chowdhury profile by Jesse Cameron Alick
When a friend invites me to a cemetery, I will always say yes. Especially if it’s Shayok Misha Chowdhury. Misha famously loves cemeteries, which he picked up from his partner, Kameron Neal, and it’s such a pleasure to crawl around the paths of Greenwood Cemetery with this Man for All Seasons. I’ve seen Misha’s artistry manifest in different forms over the years - directing, writing, performing. But Misha’s work has a common thread - he is interested in Memoir. Theatrical Memoir that is so specific with its tongue and nuanced with its words, that the language of it becomes universal.
Misha is wonderful at understanding things. Which is why his new piece RHEOLOGY is such a fascinating thing - as it’s about something he has yet to understand. RHEOLOGY is a celebration of Misha’s life with his mother, Bulbul Chakraborty - who is very much alive and thriving - and who will also be performing alongside her son in this piece. Bulbul is not a performer by training - if fact, she’s a physicist. She studies the laws that govern the way matter moves under force, why sand moves the way it does, why a solid might move like a liquid if a strong enough force is exerted. The more Misha tells me about his mother, the more I’m enamored with her. But to have a brilliant mother is a complicated thing. There seems to be an endless desire from Misha to understand her. But how can one understand one's mother when she speaks a language you never will? Bulbul speaks the language of creation itself. “I think the whole piece is about me registering that my mother inhabits a universe that I never will. Every day she goes somewhere and immediately starts talking in a language that I will never understand - and I am very good at languages. So if my mother went and started speaking Portuguese, then I could learn Portuguese. I do not have enough time left in my life to learn the language that she speaks. I don’t know any of the nouns or verbs. Every noun and verb takes years of study to grasp. And so I guess that is an endless chase.”
But there is a language that they do share. In the sitting room of Misha’s family’s home there is a portrait hanging of Rabindranath Tagore, a renowned Bengali composer. Bulbul taught her son these songs growing up and now they share this language of music between them. And when the two of them sing together, a magic thing occurs. One listens and is pulled into the folds of their relationship, the nuances of their shared history, the things they have in common lining up like an eclipse. “I have learned these songs from my mother - and I think I am always trying to learn physics from her in the same way that she taught me these songs.” This effort to understand might be an impossible task, but it’s one full of generosity as well. “This project freaks me out a little bit because it feels so large. The source material. Can I make something about my relationship with my mother? But I think that I just feel the impulse is a little bit to sort of share my mom. I'm an only child, so it's a little bit me being like ‘You can have her too, a little bit, too’”.
The opportunity to share Misha’s mother for just a little while, to see what it was like to be raised alongside him, singing and trying to understand Bulbul’s vast sciences, to be his brother for just an hour or two? What a dream. The journey of trying to understand our parents might be incredibly challenging, but I for one am inspired to help Misha with the task.
by Jesse Cameron Alick
artwork by Brenna O’Brien