Manch-Rangmanch and Virsa Vihar Society, Amritsar, will host a five-day theatre festival curated by Shiromani playwright Kewal Dhaliwal. The theatre group and Virsa Vihar jointly organise a month-long residential summer workshop, an intensive training programme for young theatre practitioners that has become an annual feature of the city’s theatre calendar. Running from early June to early July, the workshop culminates in a five-day festival showcasing acclaimed plays and adaptations directed by Dhaliwal.
The festival will feature productions directed, designed and mentored by several eminent alumni of the National School of Drama (NSD), New Delhi, including Partho Banerjee, Pritpal Rupana and Gulzar Kabir Khan. Dhaliwal, himself a distinguished NSD alumnus and president of the Punjab Sangeet Natak Akademi, is the founder of the Amritsar-based theatre group Manch-Rangmanch.
Sharing details of the festival, Dhaliwal said: “The theatre workshop invites students from Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and other states for theatre education. The plays prepared by the students during this one-month continuous theatre workshop will be presented as part of the five-day theatre festival from July 1 to July 5 at Virsa Vihar and Preet Nagar. The student artists are involved either in the production team or as performers, and the festival is entirely run by these young theatre practitioners.”
The festival would present plays inspired by or adapted from literary and dramatic classics such as ‘Oedipus’, Bhisham Sahni’s ‘Muavze’, Dr Sawarajbor’s ‘Tu Bulhe Wangu Bol’, and acclaimed Punjabi productions including ‘Kudesan’, written by the late playwright Jatinder Brar and directed by Kewal Dhaliwal.
The plays will be staged daily at 6.30 pm at the Kartar Singh Duggal Auditorium, with free entry and no tickets or passes required. The concluding performance on July 5 will be held at Preet Nagar.
