Singin' in the Rain: Potsong on LLA at Kalapara, Patuakhali

After a successful first show, on 7 July, Rupantar and ICCCAD-IUB brought their travelling potgaan to the coastal communities in Kalapara, Patuakhali. Weeks earlier the same team had performed in Dacope, Khulna, carrying a message about locally led adaptation to a community learning to negotiate with the sea creeping into its fields. Kalapara was the next stop on that circuit.

Despite troubling weather conditions, the team set up their stage under an abandoned cyclone shelter and started announcing their show to the local community. Word travelled fast and soon enough, villagers from around the area started collecting to the tune of folk music performed by the Rupantar team. They were mostly women carrying children on their hips or steering them by the hand through the mud. With the community present, the team started the potgaan performance with rhythms built to make an unfamiliar idea feel like something the audience already half knew. This time the song had company. The water rising at the edge of the crowd from the torrential rain was teaching its own lesson alongside it.

The turnout was unexpected: a village that could reasonably have stayed indoors chose instead to sit through rain and rising water for an hour of folk songs and potgaan about the very hazard closing in around them.

At the end of the performance, a few words of conclusion from the COLOCAL Research Officer, Fahmid Mohtasin tied everything together, and the team bode farewell to Kalapara as they planned for their next performance.