BHARAT RANG MAHOTSAV FROM 5TH JANUARY TO 20 JAN, 2013

JANUARY 3, 2013 BY SAGARMEDIA

The 15th Bharat Rang Mahotsav commences from 5th January and continues till 20th January, 2013

New Delhi, January 2, 2013: The National School of Drama ushers in the New Year by hosting the 15th edition of its annual international theatre festival, the Bharat Rang Mahotsav (BRM). In keeping with the tradition of presenting outstanding theatre that allows for meaningful engagement, this year also the BRM will be offering a rich fare of 87 productions selected from across India and the world at 8 venues from 5th to 20th January, 2013.

These performances are in a variety of languages, idioms and styles, and celebrate multiple realities. Most of the regional language performances and foreign languages will have English/Hindi surtitles.

Atmakatha, written by Mahesh Elkunchwar and directed by Vinay Sharma from the group Padatik, Kolkata, will have Kulbhushan Kharbanda on stage after a long gap, and will be the inaugural performance.

Over the last 7 years, each year a part of the festival has travelled to a second city, which have so far included Bengaluru, Kolkata, Mumbai, Lucknow, Bhopal, Chennai and Amritsar. This year the BRM will travel to Jaipur, where 11 Indian and 9 international plays from the main selection will be presented.

Focus on Popular Theatre

A new form of urban popular theatre sprang up in the major cities of India in the second half of the 19th century. The generic term to describe this kind of theatre was ‘Parsi Theatre.’ Initially supported by Parsi businessmen in Bombay, this form adopted the conventions of the proscenium theatre. With all the stage machinery of newly evolving theatre technology available in India, it soon became a commercially viable new form of entertainment for a growing Indian middle class. Drawing equally on elements from existing regional forms of performance practiced at the time, and in turn influencing them with western ideas in terms of writing and performance, the contemporary Indian theatre scene took off in a number of new directions from the 1850s onwards.

Regional variants of Parsi Theatre still attract massive audiences in towns and villages, who eagerly await new productions each season, as theatre companies make annual visits as part of their touring program.

In order to celebrate these early beginnings of Popular Theatre, NSD has especially invited five extremely successful commercial theatre companies from across the country, to perform at the BRM this year.

The Surabhi Company from Andhra Pradesh performs one of their most successful productions, Maya Bazar. Nayantara Opera brings Aami Bingsho Shatabdeer Bish, a Bengali Jatra from Kolkata, while Krishna Kala Kendra from Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh, offers a Nautanki Swaang, Bhakt Puranmal. Raahen from Pune, Maharashtra, offers a operatic version of Sangeet Maanapmaan, while Lokjagruti Rangabhumi from Wadsa, presents a lesser known theatrical form known as Jhadipatti with Muthabhar Tandul.

Manto Focus

As a tribute to Saadat Hasan Manto on his birth centenary, the 15th Bharat Rang Mahotsav will be presenting 6 productions based on him and his works. These include Mantoiyat by Danish Husain and Mahmood Farooqui; Ik See Manto by Kewal Dhaliwal; Khol Do aur Mozel by Devendra Raj Ankur; Dafa 292 by NSD’s Repertory Company; and two productions – Mantorama and Kaun Hai Yeh Gustakh? from Pakistan, by Sunil Shankar and Shahid Nadeem and Madeeha Gauhar, respectively.

Indian Panorama

Apart from these 11 productions we have 52 other performances – adaptations, revisitings, improvisations, devised work and traditional and folk-inspired renditions – reflecting the complex contemporary languages of theatre practiced across India.

Rang Bajrang inspired by Richard Nash’s Rainmaker, is being presented as a tribute to Dinesh Thakur, who scripted and directed it, and who passed away in September last year.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare is known to be successfully revisited and reinvented by succeeding generations. The BRM has a selection of 7 productions that range from Lear as a solo performance from Turkmenistan, to Julius Caesar in an Assamese adaptation. Piya Behroopia is a Hindi adaptation of Twelfth Night that played at The Globe Theatre in London last season, followed by The Footsbarn Theatre’s Indian Tempest expressed as a piece of physical theatre, while Wendy Jehlen of the USA presents excerpts from Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Titus Andronicus as a choreographed non-verbal piece in The Knocking Within. Finally Yamadoothu–After the Death of Othello in Malayalam from Kerala is based on Shakespeare’s Othello. Macbeth by Koushik Sen presents an interesting interpretation of the original text in a Bengali translation.

As can be seen from the schedule there are productions based on works of writers like Euripides, Aristophanes, Bertolt Brecht, Dario Fo, Passolini, Heiner Muller, August Strindberg, William Shakespeare, Jean Paul Sartre, Rabindranath Tagore, Saadat Hasan Manto, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Uday Prakash, Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar, Vijayadan Detha and G. P. Deshpande. There are also productions based on poems of Aga Shahid Ali, Tamizhachi Tanga Pandiyan, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Arun Kolatkar and Michael Madhusudan Dutt.

This year we have 6 solo performances, Inspired by Blindness, King Lear, Massage, Medea, Eatho Chirakadiyochakal and The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show; and two contemporary dance performances – Sangeeta Sharma’s Anveshan, Shobha Deepak Singh’s Parikrama

International Segment

The international dimension comprises 18 performances, equally varied in their theatrical vocabulary, stylistics & collaborative aspirations. Out of these we have 7 from the SAARC countries.

There are 2 productions from Bangladesh – Brecht’s Measures Taken and Cixous’s Drums on the Dam; 2 productions from Pakistan, both part of the Manto Focus; 2 from Sri Lanka, The Island about prisoners in jail performing Antigone and Dhawala Bheeshana, a translation of Sartre’s Men without Shadows. From Afghanistan we have Dario Fo’s The Tale of the Tiger.

Footsbarn Theatre from France will be presenting Indian Tempest, an intercultural collaborative piece based on Shakespeare’s Tempest. Teatro Potlach from Italy has brought us Fellini’s Dream based on some of the memorable characters from Fellini’s films. A Warsaw Melody from China is a tragic love story; and After the Birds, that looks at what is left after Aristophanes’ The Birds, ancient Greeks and their culture, is a collaborative production by Chorea Theatre Association and Earthfall from the U.K.

This year we have 3 countries participating for the first time – Azerbaijan, Taiwan and Hungary. Azerbaijan with a musical theatre piece, Monsieur Jor Dan and Dervish Mastali Sheikh; Hungary with Virgin and the Beast, written by one of their most famous film personalities, Zsolt Pozsgai and directed by Armand Kautzky; and Taiwan with A True Calling, an adaptation of an Indian folklore.

Allied Programme/Events

Like every year this year we have a variety of events as part of our allied programmes. This includes 4 lectures – “Schechner On Schechner the Director” by Dr. Richard Schechner; “What about Machines?: Technology and Politics in Japan’s Contemporary Performance Culture” by Prof. Tadashi Uchino; on “Ready-Made-Actors and Remote-Controlled Audiences” by Stefan Kaegi; and on the book, “Theatre & Performance Design” by Prof. Jane Collins.

Apart from this we have 5 performances/installations in this category. These include Confined – an operatic song cycle performance/video installation written and produced by Tammy Brennan, Australia, and directed by Younes Bachir, Spain; Unselfed, a devised performance piece from Mumbai, directed by Sujay Saple; and Stroll, a looped performative exploration of contemporary relationships, adapted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lorca’s Yerma, and Harold Pinter’s Black and White, and directed by Moon Moon Singh, Delhi. In addition we have a Public Space Project, Improvised Spotlight, which is an interactive installation directed by Pallav Chander; and Pagadi, an installation theatre project based on the tradition of turbans in India, with integrated elements of theatre, dance, music, and design.

There are 2 exhibitions – Celebrating a Decade, 2002-2012, and Popular Theatre; and also a ‘Meet the Director’s’ forum.

We also have an offsite project called Parallel Cities, curated by Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi, supported by Max Muller Bhavan, Germany and Pro Helvatia, Switzerland, that will be held at 4 different venues in Delhi.

About National School of Drama

The National School of Drama is one of the foremost theatre training institutions in the world and the only one of its kind in India. It was set up by the Sangeet Natak Akademi as one of its constituent units in 1959. In 1975, it became an independent entity and was registered as an autonomous organization under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860, fully financed by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

Bharat Rang Mahotsav

The Bharat Rang Mahotsav was started 15 years ago by the NSD in order to contribute to the growth and development of theatre across the country. From being a national festival that presented the work of some of the most creative theatre workers in India, it has grown into an international event, hosting theatre companies from around the world, and is today acknowledged as the largest theatre festival of Asia dedicated solely to theatre. In addition to the national and international performances that are staged during the Festival, the fare also includes exhibitions, installations, interactive sessions with directors and performers for the general public and professionals, a vibrant theatre café, and a shorter festival in another city to which some of the productions travel.

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