FIRST TIME A PLAY IN BAGHELI PERFORMED TODAY DURING NATIONAL SCHOOL OF DRAMA’S 19th EDITION OF BHARAT RANG MAHOTSAV – ‘ANAND RAGHUNANDAN’

Ø  NSD Graduate & famous Film & Theatre personality Piyush Mishra on his personal visit to National School of Drama during Bharat Rang Mahotsav interacted with students and theatre aficionados  

New Delhi, 10th February, 2017: Today for the first time in the history of National School of Drama’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav a play in Bagheli ‘Anand Raghunandan’ was performed at Kamani Auditorium, Copernicus Marg. The play of 1 hour 40 minutes duration was performed by Bhopal’s Madhya Pradesh Natya Vidyalaya and was directed by Sanjay Upadhyay. Apart from this, today during the 19th edition of Bharat Rang Mahotsav, 4 more plays were performed including Sohini Sengupta’s Panchajanya in bengali, Bijyendra Kumar Tank’s Gunda, Guru Gourang Barik play in OdiaMoghul Tamasha and by Fool’s Cap Theatre, UK – The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, directed by Vini Carvalho & Ramon Ayres.

 

As part of Advitiya 2017, first time for this year’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav a musical performance by Aligarh Muslim University’s famous Music Band rendered soulful renditions in Hindi and Urdu. 4 teams from various Institutes & Colleges including Aligarh Muslim University, Hansraj College, Gargi College and Maharaja Surajmal Institute out of the total 53 teams enacted Street Plays at NSD Lawns under Ambience Performance as well. Also, Bamboo Dance, Chau Dance and Light Dance were performed in the NSD campus today.

 

Piyush Mishra, NSD graduate and famous film & theatre personality on his personal visit to NSD, met and freely interacted with NSD students and theatre lovers and shared his views on 19th Bharat Rang Mahotsav, “At NSD I have learnt a lot which is helping me today. When I was a student here there was no such Drama Festival during those days. Bharat Rang Mahotsav is a great initiative and it gives theatre lovers a very nice opportunity to interact with all varied people working in theatre in India and abroad. I love Delhi and National School of Drama where I graduated from, since my work demands that I stay in Mumbai, every year during Bharat Rang Mahotsav I want to reconnect with my days here and that is the reason that I always visit my alma mater. After being an active theatre practitioner in Delhi for 20 years, I went to Mumbai to work in the Hindi Film Industry since in India we do not have a vibrant and paying theatre industry like in America. I also believe that in films there should be some lessons, some great story intermingled with a loads of entertainment, rather than stress on realism or charaterisation, etc.”

 

Today, during the Meet the Director – face to face at National School of Drama, renowned theatre personality Aditi Desai, Director ofSamudraManthan said when questioned why she chose the story of a female protagonist, “the play is actually based on a true story of a female merchant sailors wife who captained a ship and made two round trips from Africa because her husband had tuberculosis. It is very interesting that we don’t have much about women sailors in our history even though our country has one of the longest coastlines in the world.” Playwright and the Lead Actor of SamundraManthan, Devaki Bharat Dave also added “in Gujarat theatre drama is very static and drawing room like we wanted to change that and do something new and bring an awe factor by adding sets that are more grand and represent an open space like the sea”

 

Amitava Dutta, Director of Tomar Ami when asked his inspiration for the play said, “I took inspiration from a Slovenian play called Take Me Into Your Hands, I tried to portray the relationship between the new world of ever changing technology and the old school world of book lovers and this play is dedicated to all the book lovers like me who thinks book lovers are left behind in this age of eBooks.”

 

The 6- part Katha Workshop Series in Performance & Craft of 19th Bharat Rang Mahotsav today had its last workshop on Marsiya. Marsiya means a lamentation for a great departed soul, an elegy. lt is a poem of mourning now mainly associated with the valour and martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain in the battle of Karbala. The Marsiya adopted different formats till it finally favored the musaddas, a six-line verse of a rhyming quatrain followed by a couplet with a separate rhyme scheme. The first four lines extend the story, while the couplet provides pause for reflection on the discourse. While many have written marasi, the masters who brought the Marsiya to epic perfection were Mir Babar Ali Anees and Mirza Salaamat Ali Dabeer, the two nineteenth-century Urdu poets of Lucknow. Urdu Marsiya is unique in its imagery, vocabulary and sentiment, and with its musical base has reached great heights of religious, cultural and intellectual expression.