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Keeping theatre alive
Theatre is a perfect platform for many artists in the country to enter the films. To encourage theatre artists, Abhinaya Srinivas founded ‘Abhinaya National Theatre Festival’ in 2006. Speaking about his journey, Abhinaya Srinivas says, “When I was 10-year-old, I used to watch street plays in my village and that drive me to theatre field.
Theatre is a perfect platform for many artists in the country to enter the films. To encourage theatre artists, Abhinaya Srinivas founded ‘Abhinaya National Theatre Festival’ in 2006. Speaking about his journey, Abhinaya Srinivas says, “When I was 10-year-old, I used to watch street plays in my village and that drive me to theatre field.
Later, I tried to act in many plays but many people rejected me and said I am not suitable for the field. That inspired me more to try seriously in this field. In 1989 after my first play ‘Galivana’ I acted in many plays till 2003. Later I decided to do something for the revival of the theatre field and started ‘Abhinaya’,a monthly magazine in 2004. I used to write reviews of the plays by travelling all over the Telugu states in the magazine.”
Srinivas acted in 10 films and later decided to stick to the theatre. He started Abhinaya National Theatre Festival in 2006 at Ravindra Bharati. “I started Abhinaya National Theatre Festival to present the design and technical usage of other states plays to our artists and audience. In my observation, Telugu plays mostly depends on verbal communication where as other states artists use the sets and lighting very well. Till now, through Abhinaya, we staged more than 280 plays in 10 languages,” adds Srinivas.
This year the Abhinaya National Theatre Festival organised from August 9-11 at Ravindra Bharati. Abhinaya Srinivas is the only person in the South India, who involved in organising more than 20 multilingual theatre festivals all over India. He is organising the same festival at Guntur, Tirupati every year.
“We are organising Abhinaya Festival in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka states and planning to do in more languages. We also worked with cultural organisations of, Manipuri, Bengali, and Assam. When we go to other states, many people come to us and appreciated us and many government bodies encouraged us for our effort of bringing various theatre artists on one stage,” he shares.
“Every year, we invite entries for the Abhinaya festival and we received more than 100 entries for this year. This year, we selected the plays based on the ‘National Integrity’ topic,” He informs.
“Telugu theatre artists are not concentrating on technical and design aspects and only managing through verbal. Most of the Telugu plays are revolves around women related issues but no woman come to see the plays. The present theatre situation in India is in a bad condition. The Central Government should take necessary steps to revive the theatre field,”concludes Srinivas.
By V Sateesh Reddy
