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4th Guwahati Theatre Festival gets under way

By STAFF REPORTER

GUWAHATI, Dec 6 - Taking theatre to the younger generation through carefully selected plays and workshops for students, the fourth edition of the Guwahati Theatre Festival got under way at the Pragjyoti ITA Centre, Machkhowa here today.

The three-day festival started with Hindi comedy Patte Khul Gaye directed by veteran theatre actor Rakesh Bedi. The play, narrating the story of Dr Manoj Rai and his wife Manju Rai who have invited a group of friends for dinner, was a hilarious portrait of the hypocrisy in society. The play was received well by the audience.

The theatre festival aims to showcase world-class performances with quality entertainment, thus becoming a prestigious landmark in the cultural landscape of Guwahati.

�The idea behind Guwahati Theatre Festival is to reach out to wider audiences and help shed the notion that theatre-going is an activity restricted only to a certain section of people. While we are launching with theatre, we hope to highlight the importance of theatres and plays in the region and promote the culture of appreciating various forms of performing arts,� said Sunit Jain, festival chairman and publisher of English weekly magazine GPlus.

As part of the festival, around 100 students from Sanskriti the Gurukul and IIT Guwahati participated in a theatre workshop hosted today by the Guwahati Theatre Festival and Brahmaputra Foundation and supported by Numaligarh Refinery Limited and North Eastern Council.

The workshop was conducted by Rakesh Bedi. The youngsters got an opportunity to learn communication through acting and dramatics, focusing on voice and movement techniques with specific learning goals that were demonstrated at the workshop. Bedi spoke at length about the nuances of acting, the use of hand gestures, expressions and the importance of timing in theatre.

Bedi split the word �actor� into �A� for act, �C� for concentration, �T� for timing, �O� for observation and �R� for reaction and laid emphasis on the importance of these skills in the profession of acting.

The festival is being organised by GPlus in association with The Assam Tribune, Assam Tourism, Apollo Hospitals, Purabi, Bank of Baroda, Indian Oil and Life Insurance Corporation.

Earlier, Vineet Grover, Regional Head, Pernod Ricard; SD Bose, Managing Director of WAMUL (Purabi); Uttiya Bhattacharya, CGM of Indian Oil; and Sunit Jain, Publisher and Managing Director of GPlus as well as the Chairman of the Guwahati Theatre Festival, inaugurated the event.

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