Beyond Borders

The Creative Arts (TCA)

Beyond Borders is one of many powerful stage productions created and performed by Director/Actress Ramanjit Kaur of The Creative Arts (TCA) Kolkata, India. TCA uses theater

and theatrical training to facilitate women’s deep self-probing to achieve self-actualization

TCA demands that its female participants connect with and bear their hearts and souls, their anxieties, secrets, sorrows and joys to regain their torn and tattered confidence. With this confidence the actresses begin to discover they have a powerful voice to engage in world discourse around them. They begin to build productive mutually beneficial relationships with their communities, families and friends.

TCA theatrical training and stage performances awaken, women’s awareness of and commitment to the importance of self and having, using their voices in our collective humanity.

Beyond Borders Production

The all-female cast of Beyond Borders explored boundaries of nationality, caste, color, ethnicity, gender, sexuality - walls men erect to garner socio-economic resources and advantaged to ease their fears, insecurities, and hunger for power. Beyond Borders questioned whether these boundaries are more important than humanity itself. Two poems by Neal Hall – Blood on Our Hands and Where Do I Sit- were central to and used to inform the play and provide dialogue.

The Poet-Collaborator’s Comments

I was honored to have participated in this brilliant production. Rarely does one have the chance to witness complete mastery and genius merged on the same stage. Beyond Borders does this very powerfully. On par with Les Misérables, Beyond Borders is one of the best, if not the best, theater productions I’ve ever witnessed. It was a remarkable, must-see production.

It began with an entrance that grabs your sight and inches its way step by step, act by act to snatch your soul from your chest and have you exam it, its role in racism, sexism, class and caste offenses against our common humanity. The powerful actresses were committed to telling, embodying, crying, bleeding these issues on the canvas of the stage. There were no let downs in passion, intensity, and acting from one actress to the next. Each equally carried the weight of our offensives on their backs and shoulders across Borders’ stage.

The background narratives of the production were just as powerful, informative and harmonious as the spotlighted narratives dramatized in the stage foreground. Much was said without words.

In many portions of the play words would never, could never convey, speak definitively of the gut –wrenching pain the actresses dug so deep from inside themselves, their personal pains and sadness, to bring forth to listening hearts. The ending leaves you wanting the beginning again.