Call for Application – Tamasha Festival in Pakistan
Tamasha Festival on behalf of ASSITEJ Pakistan invites international participation to its upcoming theater festival in Pakistan. As this is the first year, the festival is not inviting theater productions, but only theater experts to participate in the Festival.
TYA experts are invited to host master workshops, participate in the public panel discussions during the Festival and contribute as jury in the Festival. Please drop an email of expression of interest at umair@thelittleart.org if you are interested.
Tamasha Festival will bear the costs of boarding and lodging of the international theater experts during the Festival in Lahore.
Gogi aur Jugnoo ka Tamasha – The Little Art performs first theatre play for children and young in Lahore
After years of working with students and teachers on the importance of drama and performance in education, this is the first time The Little Art has produced a theatre play especially written and performed for children. The newly established theatre program “Tamasha – Theatre for young audience” presented a 45-minute play “Gogi and Jugnu ka Tamasha” which was a story about a 10-year-old girl who is bored as a child and encounters a mysterious friend with whom she goes on a journey of imagination.
Over a period of 3 days of the performance from 23rd to 25th September 2016 at Ali Auditorium, the halls were completely full and audience poured in hundreds on all days, curious children tagging their families along to watch the colorful performance. Nearly 1500 hundred audiences attended the shows in 3-days run.
The production was approached with contemporary techniques of video projections and movements to go along with the theme around the experience of cinema. The idea behind the play was to change the culture where adults only perform for adults and that adults can also perform for children, hence the play was performed by two adults Uzma Ali as Gogi and Umair Mushtaq as Jugnu in the role of 10-year-old children.
FEEDBACK
A 10-year-old girl after the play said;
“I got to know that our adults enjoy life in their own way and we children enjoy in our own way and today I really enjoyed together with my family. It was a very colorful play and really funny”
A spectator Saba Hassan said
“It was worth every minute and even the non theatre loving friends I had dragged along with me found the play very entertaining! The lead roles were perfect, the soundtrack exceptional and the animation uniquely eye catching. Being a huge supporter of theatre in Pakistan, yours was a breath of fresh air and a very strong reminder to all the adults like us to relax and let the inner child out. Hope to see more plays from your team soon and though it was free I definitely would not mind paying for art. Our people need to realize the value of it”.
The Little Art is a registered non-profit arts education organization which uses the medium of art to promote education and positive social values through innovative learning opportunities among children and youth, especially marginalized and from low-income backgrounds. It works in public and private education sector through our child-centered programs to improve children’s experience of learning through the arts.