In May 2017, a group of writers from across India were invited to a 2-week residential workshop. The idea was to seek out and mentor new and emerging voices with a specific focus on writing plays for children and young people. Much of what passes for children’s theatre is based on well-worn stories and folk tales, which fail to address troubling issues of our times. It is vital that young audiences engage creatively with these issues. The purpose of the residency was to unpack and discover newer ways of writing plays about difficult things.
Conceived between
Ranga Shankara, Bangalore, and
Yellowcat Theatre, Delhi, and supported by
Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore, the residency, mentored by
Lutz Hübner (Germany) and
Mike Kenny (UK), has yielded five new plays, which address a broad swathe of issues.
The evening’s program will showcase dramatized readings of selected scenes from each new play interspersed with conversations about theatre for young audiences (TYA) and the role of new writing. This also marks the arrival of five exciting and powerful voices writing for young people –
Swati Simha,
Nisha Abdulla,
Kavya Srinivasan,
Shridevi Mahadevan and
Ram Ganesh Kamatham.
Subsequently, the scripts will be released into the public domain for interested directors and theatre companies to produce.
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