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Peel Park is transformed for the Mela!

Taj has lived in Bradford all his life and for the last five years he has been able to earn his living as a writer. After a very successful production of his first full length drama, Players, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (WYP), he was commissioned to write a play about the Mela. Now, three years on, he's finished the script and rehearsals are in progress.

Taj says: "I wanted to write something about the Mela because I thought there's lots of stories there, it's fascinating. There were almost too many stories to tell. Basically I camped out at the Mela, wandered around with a notebook talking to people and sidling up to people running the stalls and the rides. It's a great excuse just to talk to people...The idea of wandering around and watching people, I just find it fascinating. I do it politely because I'm British."

Taj

Now he can actually see the results of these conversations on the stage of the WYP's Courtyard Theatre: "It's great and strange seeing it. It's great because it's always good to see your plays and I can sort of remember back in 2006, that's what I was doing when I wrote that line, to get little flashes of where I was when I was writing it."

Taj has woven the sights and sounds of the Mela - and more - into his story: "It's about a handful of central characters. Troy, who is a soldier at a recriuting desk, is having - I guess you can call it - a metaphysical collapse. You have Ranjit who is a Sikh martial artist in a display team at the Mela. You have Miriam and Sanjit - Sanjit is a kind of charity activist and Miriam operates a pottery stall and they have this ongoing love and hate thing throughout the play. You have Marek, a 70-year-old Holocaust survivor, on the ferris wheel and he is telling the story of his life. Overseeing all of it is Angela, a 16-year-old pregnant girl...It's not exactly realism but it is very much influenced by the world I bumped into. It is the Bradford Mela for me but it's also like a weird hallucinogenic version of it so it's not strictly documentary."

It's difficult to miss the robot at the Mela...

He believes this reflects the impression people take away from the festival: "To tell you the truth, if you wander around the Mela it is a slightly disorientating, slightly surreal experience because you see those giant fish floats or the giant robot that always gets pulled out. It's my local park so there's that kind of layer of that's how it normally is but you get 140,000 people over the weekend all crammed together, all displaying themselves and going to displays, and it's something that's unique...It's also kind of scary as well because you get a bunch of people together and all sorts of things can happen. Crowds do strange things so it's a theatrical space, a dramatic space."

For Taj the Mela is more than a good weekend out or a place where writers go to find new material - it's something that's very important for Bradford: "A public space can be fascinating because you can see communities brought together. That's the good thing about the Mela - it's a fairly segregated city where people exist in their own zones so it's been, 'we come together...'

The actors [Photo: Jonathan Turner]

"Bradford can be an interesting place, it can be a disturbing place because there are divisions. There are certain communities which are separated from other communities so there is this kind of weird state where you can see certain areas as one ethnicity and another area as another ethnicity. It's slightly more fluid as people move out of the city. The worrying thing is the brain drain that seems to be occurring in Bradford - lots of people seem to be moving out."

But Taj also sees Bradford as a place which has "massive potential" with the Mela and the arts in general playing a big role in the city's future: "Regeneration can sometimes mean shiny glass-fronted buildings but that's just buildings. A regeneration of Bradford just has to be linked to something that is culturally vibrant. I know it might seem as though the arts are an elite sphere that isn't linked to the everyday life of people but that's not true. People are always telling stories, and if you can find ways of reflecting these stories then that's great, and I would really like to see theatre companies coming to and growing in Bradford."

Mela is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds from Friday June 28th until July 28th, 2008. The 2008 Bradford Mela takes place on June 14th and 15th.