Most likely the last year that I will curate the Theatre Appreciation Course at NSD. It has been a delightful run spanning a decade, and how the course has grown! The only course of its kind in the country, we inaugurated it in 2010 to address dwindling audience numbers and a shocking absence of informed appreciation of theatre. The course received a modest 50 applications in the first year, and they were up to 600 last year! A total of 500 participants - writers, researchers, journalists, curators, teachers, aesthetes, theatre enthusiasts, IAS officers, engineers, doctors, police officers, home-makers, retired persons, college students, activists, artists, and many many more - have attended the course so far and found it immensely valuable. Through the course, I have had the good fortune of meeting several brilliant minds from all walks of life, and I hope the upcoming edition will bring yet another exciting group together. The experts we are able to invite, the theatre archive we are able to mobilise, and the scale at which we hold the course, is only possible at an institution like NSD. Apply, apply, apply!!
National School of Drama (NSD) invites applications for the Theatre Appreciation Course, to be held in NSD campus from May 27-June 04, 2019. This cross-disciplinary course will critically examine the formation of contemporary theatre and its multiple histories, forms, ideologies and locales. The course offered attempts to familiarize participants with practices, genealogies and methods that help analyze the contemporary with reference to the ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘international’.
To this end, the course has been designed as a combination of lecture sessions conducted by renowned thinkers and practitioners, followed by group discussions, video modules and viewing of live performances. The lecture inputs traverse a range of topics such as ‘modernity’, ‘tradition’ and ‘popular’ in performance, the classical, its formations and challenges, how theatre practices interface with literature and media. General introduction to stage lighting, costume, back stage auditoria and documentation practices position the notion of materiality of theatre practices at the forefront of any discourse on performance. In addition to this, to encourage writing on theatre, workshops on theatre criticism and playwriting may also be held simultaneously for interested participants. This is an intensive course for which reading material will be made available. A participation certificate will be awarded upon successful completion.
Last date to submit your forms - May 15, 2019. Forms are available at NSD reception on all weekdays from 11am-4pm. They can also be downloaded from NSD website:
<https://nsd.gov.in/…/application-invited-for-theatre-appre…/>