Bimal Subedi's play nominated for META International Theatre award 2023 for four categories

Bimal Subedi is a prominent theatre personality in Nepal; He is a well-known name in south Asian theatre practice. He has worked with many national and international veteran artists and renowned art centers. He contributed to Nepali art, culture, literature, and theatre by bringing them into the international arena. By doing this he has transformed and transferred Nation's philosophy, cultural values, social reflection, and intangible heritages into a global platform. His works and perspective are very different from other theatre artists. His vigorous such kind of efforts and engagements contributed to proposer Nepal art as well as the second layer of diplomacy or soft diplomacy. 

For that, Bimal Subedi has received national and international awards; He received the ON theatre award -2016 from India. He was the youngest one who received it. And recently he has honored with the International heritages award-2022 in Malaysia. It is our national pride that, his play 'The departed down' has been selected for the very prestigious Mahindra Excellency Theatre award-2023 (India) in four categories including best direction award. For the finale, 10 plays have been selected out of 495. The awarding plays will be showcased in Delhi from the 25th - 29th of March 2023. Bimal and Victor jointly won the Serendipity arts grant award- 2019 in the same project. Bimal has written this story 9 years back to make a movie but due to some reason, it could not happen. The play is based on his same story. The story is about Bhutanese refugees who are forcefully displaced and compelled to be scattered in many countries. Bimal Subedi always tries to pick local issues, texture, and narrative in his works. He strongly believes, one good artist or director cannot ignore their rooted narratives and literature by performing only under the shelter of well-acclaimed international text just to grab the audience or masses. This is our responsibility to take the risk to promote our culture, our literature, and our own heritages with contemporary innovative craft. We need to bring the audience into our zone rather than flow with the waves of the market. This is our responsibility to uplift art and theatre literacy also. Else, we will always remain a Monkey of outdated Madaari (Puppeteer) of Cultural hegemony. Theatre should be a medium to Foster new dimension and create more rooms to explore and respect, He says. 

The performance is influenced by the forcefully displaced global refugee crisis and it takes references from the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees called the Lhotsampas. The play starts with a journey of seeking a place called home. It then slowly delves into the process of building up a cordial environment through hardship and struggle. Eventually, a place called home is born. A time comes again when the home faces external sinister forces. Failing to defend it from such brute might the people are forced out of their homes, in the dark, never to be able to see the dawn from their homes again. The place called home is packed in a piece of small baggage and starts an unknown journey. The loved ones perished in the perilous, uncertain, uncontrollable, ill-fated unknown journey. Standing at the crossroad, when your memories are stuck on the beaten path, the idea of returning back home becomes impossible as everything has been burned into ashes. 

Designer/writer and director Bimal Subedi says: This performance attempts to explore the correlation between the displaced body and space. It tries to explore the physical vocabularies of the body in adverse times and situations. When your home becomes a fragmented disjointed image and (you are) unable to put the pieces back together, the displaced body becomes a reference for oppression. The performance tries to explore, through the lines and curves of the body, when a body is displaced without a border or a destination. It seeks two different texts - the spoken and the physical and the juxtaposition of these two to create a third text. The Departed Dawn is a creative response to a time when we are constantly living in an environment where violence has become a regular phenomenon.

He adds: Nepali story needs to travel around the world as it deserves as eastern philosophy and our own rooted narratives are always organic to serve. There are so many good plays, or play texts in the world which could be commercially successful and also wretches your heart but I want Nepali texts to be traveled and explored more. I am a director/designer but I am a partial writer of all my works because I cannot write from pen on paper but I can write from the many elements on stages so I have never done the play as it is. On other hand, I am a co-author of all the plays which I have done before. In contemporary art making director are also a writer; they should have a grip on text, contemporary issues, content, and forms also. Directors are not the text executor who only picks a very successful text and claims themselves as successful director. So, my priority is Nepali stories, Nepali literature, Nepali materials, and Nepali plays with Nepali ethos.

A few weeks ago "The confession", written, designed, and directed by him, was showcased in the National school of drama and received a standing ovation with high appreciation from veteran theatre personalities, professors, art critics, and students. Bimal says: theatre should have visual and aesthetically transcending quality where the spectator gets their freedom to pick the slice according to their experience, efforts, and understanding. Reciting the day-to-day realism on stage with soap opera dramatic structure or as conventional cinema realism is not a contemporary theatre anymore and it is already outdated by 100 years before even the more. 

The Departed Dawn is a collaborative production between Theatre Village Nepal and Akhoka Theatre, India. Victor Thaudom has supported Bimal in direction and dramaturgy, and also performed a lead. The performance is physical visceral and non-verbal, where the body and its five senses have been used as the ultimate truth of the emotion and harsh materials at once. Bimal Subedi was also awarded by Serendipity Arts Grant for this production with Victor Thaudam in 2021. The play will be showcased on 25th March 2023 at Shri Ram Centre Auditorium, New Delhi.