Delhi kids remember Tagore

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The Delhi Children’s Theatre celebrated 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore with a two-day festival which started on February 7. Around 450 schoolchildren performed Ritu Rang, a nritya-natika based on Tagore’s poems. Two hundred children joined the chorus and 250 complemented them with dance and drama, exploring moods of seasons.

“It was a huge success. Tagore’s poems were adapted into plays. Our mission was to introduce Delhi children to the literary world of Tagore. They know much less about the poet, compared to children in West Bengal. We had to use choreographers from Kolkata and Bangladesh as we could not find dancers with deep knowledge of Rabindra Sangeet,” said Gayatri Ray, the chairperson of the organisation.
The second day of the festival showcased Rainstorm and Autumn Leaves, a dance drama based on Tagore’s poem Barshoshesh and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind.
The production, conceptualised by Sharmishtha Mukherjee, combined diverse elements of expressions from East and West.
The experiment with two different genres of music, Rabindra Sangeet and excerpts of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Season, generated moving musical notes on stage.
In both the poems, the imagery of a powerful storm is used metaphorically as an agent of destruction to pave the way for new creation.
The 58-year-old cultural organisation focuses on child development through theatre, ballet, dance and music. Its mission is to introduce children to the fascinating world of imagination, fantasy and creativity. Even without permanent premises, the Delhi Children Theatre has managed to reach out to children in their schools by setting up training centres and organising annual festivals.
“We want to reach out to more children through the medium of theatre. The aim is to provide platform to children for their creative expression. We have members with various backgrounds to design and facilitate the overall training experience of the participants,” said Ms Ray, who joined the organisation in 1979.
As a chairperson, Ms Ray feels the need to reach out to young people and enrol them as members to take the movement forward.