Kids trained in drama by NSD alumnus

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Vikas Mehrotra came to Kerala this time to train a bunch of students. Over the past one month, the theatre director and playwright has been tutoring them in speech craft, theatre games, music, body language etc. The interesting thing is, Vikas does not speak Malayalam, but that is the only language most of his students know. On Monday evening, Vikas’s students staged ‘Ammuvinte Swapnangal,’ a free adaptation of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ at the Lenin Balavadi here. The play is about the fantasies of a child, her journey in the land of dreams. During her journey, she meets many people and animals, she visits many places and at the end, she wakes up with dreams of a world filled with joy and happiness. The camp was organised by Suhruth Natakakalari Balabhavan, Vithura, in association with National School of Drama (NSD), of which Vikas is an alumnus. Vikas has been in Thiruvananthapuram for the past one month training the youngsters in the language of the theatre. According to him, theatre is very challenging for an actor as well as for a technician.  ‘’For a performance, it needs a lot of time for practice, but we will not earn much, that might be the reason most of the artists performing in theatre does not consider it as a profession. Most of them either work for film or television,’’ he said. ‘’I feel lack of entertainment as the main reason for the less popularity of drama among people; most of the people find the drama difficult to understand. In Gujarati and Marathi, they commercialised drama and found an increase in the audience, but the theatre in Hindi and other regional languages lack the entertainment factor,’’ he said. Vikas, who hails from a family of businessmen in Nainital, says he does not remember the day he started loving the world of drama. He was trained as an actor in NSD and now he is working as a freelance artist in Mumbai.  Vikas, who has written and directed around 15 plays for children, is now working on his first book, which contains 15 plays for children. ‘’NSD is organising a lot of programmes for popularising theatre; every year, it organises a national theatre festival which has given  opportunities to so many newcomers, but more than this, we need the support of the government,’’ said Vikas. He also spoke about the traditional art of Kumaon, ‘Apren’, which is similar to Rangoli, based on which he has done a film, ‘Traditional Art of Kumaon’ and the Kumaoni opera form Ramlila.