Nishtha Natak Mandali is made up of 14 enthusiastic children. The play has more than 20 characters so some children were assigned 2 – 3 roles. According to their skills, interest, dedication and ability to modulate their voices, each child received a role he or she could play with ease. The idea of the play was not only to give out a message on environment awareness, but also to tell subtle things to the kids which they can carry back with them.
Our goal was to take this performance to the schools and more children across the valley. The children wanted to do a public performance at the local village Mela held on 31stMay and 1st June so we chose an Anganwadi near the Mela ground and set up our stage there. On 31st the children did their first performance. Since all the 14 children were speaking the characters, we had to look for at least 4 children to move the props. At the last minute, some kids came in and wanted to join in the performance so they were assigned the job of moving the puppets. I wrote a song for the mela and we used the “chicken dance” song to draw and entertain the audience. The first performance was amazing in precision and quality.
Those who moved the puppets, without any prior training or rehearsals, gave an excellent performance. On 1st June rain washed away our set and there was very little hope of staging the play that evening but some parents had missed out on the performance the previous day, and wanted to see it. We somehow salvaged the thoroughly wet set and gathered all the kids from the food stalls to give a repeat performance which went relatively well.
Our next agenda was to take the play to three local schools which are part of Nishtha outreach programme on 5th June, World Environment Day. The first show of the day was performed in Rakkar School at 11:00 am. 78 kids from the middle and primary school enjoyed it, commenting on how they liked how the puppet moves on the stage and the voices of the different characters. The children were very inspired because the performance was done by their classmates.
At 1:30pm we arrived at Chakwan School which is high up on the mountainside. There 65 kids were waiting eagerly for our arrival. In half an hour we organized whole setup and were ready to start our puppet show. Both the kids and the teachers were very happy at the end of this show, the like of which they had never seen before and they all joined in the dance with the puppet show team.
At the end of the day we did our last show at Norbulingka in the Euro kids. 30 to 35 Local kids and some foreigners were present there. Before starting the show Mohinder talked with them about our Clean Green Village project that how we are doing garbage program in Rakkar village.
Vijay, Sangeeta, Megha, Ravindra, Chandra Shekhar and the kids put in a great deal of effort to make these performances a great success. All the children who participated will receive a certificate and plans are afoot for future theatre programmes.
