There was camaraderie among the members of Bangalore Little Theatre (BLT) at their Annual Fellowship meet held last week at Ramada Hotel.
BLT will be celebrating their diamond jubilee year in 2020, and the meeting took the members down memory lane to look back on the several milestones they have achieved since BLT’s inception in 1960.
The event began with Sridhar Ramanathan, President of BLT, playing a quiz of sorts on questions of the first play reading and the first play to be staged by BLT.
The answers were Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest was the first play reading in 1960 and Moliere's The Prodigious Snob was the first play to be staged in 1960. “BLT is a voluntary group of people who love theatre,” said Sridhar, adding that the success of BLT lies in, “us not being a unidimensional organisation, there is substance in what we do. I would attribute it to one man, Vijay Padaki.”
Veteran theatre personality, and one of the founding members of BLT, Padaki has written over 30 original plays, which have even garnered international recognition, and his broad vision has contributed immensely to BLT.
In his presentation tracing BLT's growth and the many facets of the group, including a new Academy of Theatre Arts (ATA) set up in 2007, which works in the areas of public awareness, schools and with children, promoting new talent in theatre: new writing, new directors, new artists, both on and off stage,
Padaki said: “We focus on theatre development, which is about institution building and not just performance. You need to put in effort behind building theatre as an institution, which needs long-term investments.”
“The verticals of theatre development include public appreciation, schools and children’s theatre, courtyard theatre, and colleges and youth theatre.
These are supported by laterals or cross-cutting programmes. We are well-known for our training, new methodologies, partnerships, and talent development. Therefore we have new voices. We train actors, writers and directors and bring them to a common platform.”
The next segment was on BLT's Theatre in Education programme, which includes sustainability-environment education. BLT has partnered with the Wipro earthian project in which a teacher-trainer handbook has been written.
There was also a reading of a play, adapted from a folktale from Uttarakhand by Padaki.
The folk tales project involves collecting folk tales, with an undercurrent of sustainability-environment, from all over India and convert them into scripts. The plays are targeted at young audiences and include issues such as deforestation, systems thinking, poaching, fishing, among others.
The meeting concluded with a part of an improv performance as BLT’s Courtyard Theatre, lauded by International Theatre Institute (UNESCO), a performance of Salaam Moliere, and a performance of the short play Thermos, written by Padaki, which got the audience thinking about what sustainability means.