Theatre seems to be a popular interest among students of the various colleges of the City. However, there is a different level of seriousness when institutions actually have a theatre club designated to the enthusiasts, who take their passion forward in the form of regular productions being put up.
Metrolife speaks to a few such clubs to know how active and functional they are.
Mount Carmel PU College has a 20-member strong Dramatics Association, which consists of narrators, script writers and actors.
"Every Friday, we have an hour dedicated wholly to extracurricular activities. We meet up and discuss the upcoming fests and who gets to participate in what, according to each one's capabilities. We also attend a couple of theatre workshops whenever we can.
We usually have just one major production every year for 'Parents' Day', where we come up with the script ourselves and put whatever we learned from the workshops into practice," shares Niveditha D J, Secretary.
"Towards the middle of every year, we have an intra-college fest called 'IRIS', where the association hosts a number of events like 'Mad Ads', 'Movie Spoof' and 'Miming'. We also have a major fest called 'Esplendida', where we host two major events — 'Group Miming' and 'Mono-acting'.
As the secretary, I motivate them to participate and assign responsibilities to each member so that they are always involved in the association," she adds.
Another fairly active and respected theatre group is the Header and Footer
Club, run by the students of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
"We've done street plays, stand-up comedy and full-length comedy plays. We typically have shows in two or three windows a year and over the last three years, our members have acted in about 15 to 20 shows and entertained more than 5000 audience members," informs Vyasa Shastry, an actor, producer and scriptwriter in the club.
He feels strongly for the cause of theatre and believes that the scope for professional theatre, especially in English, is quite minimal in the country.
"A lot of people are not convinced by the idea of a play and our fascination for cinema fuels it, at least partly.
We can't show aspects like weather and we're limited by sets on stage. Ideally, there should be an audience open to attending plays, a strong college competition where people are exposed to various aspects of theatre, an institutional way of passing the knowledge from a thespian to the newbies and lastly, funding from private enterprises and newspapers who can promote the art," he adds.
The National Law School of India University is also quite a big promoter of theatre among its students, despite not having any specific club for the same.
"We do amateur theatre for the love of it. There are a bunch of enthusiastic students who meet up, read scripts, discuss plays and once in a while, put up
skits and plays.
There's noinstitutionalised body for it and whoever wants to make time for it can be a part," notes Padmini Baruah, a second-year student.
"We host an inter-college theatre festival called 'Admit One' every year. Other than that, we put up at least one annual production, which I'm directing for this year."