Theatre artistes feel Covid punch, stress on need for collective efforts at Vijayawada

Vijayawada: Entertainment is part of our life and many mediums available to entertain the public. Even a small smart phone is giving unlimited fun and entertainment. But everyone will accept that there is no replacement for live arts such as drama, dance, music and allied art forms. Drama is mass media and also a powerful medium to shoot any message directly to the minds of the audience.

The entertainment industry including the Drama is temporarily stalled due to Covid pandemic. The artistes are suffering a lot for their livelihood for lack of programmes. 'The Hans India' met two theatre personalities to record their views about 'Theatre present and Theatre after the Covid-19'.

Donatala Prakash, who has 40-year experience as stage artiste and a retired principal expressed that they should learn lessons from this pandemic. He advised the artistes community especially the artistes who are purely banking on this profession 'drama', should become a group and establish a cooperative society to overcome this sort of situations in future.

Prakash also advised the artistes to have some other activity to earn in their spare time like bag manufacturing, teaching, painting etc which will yield some additional earnings. Prakash felt that this is the best time to update the artistes according to tunes for the present trends to pull the audience to the auditorium as the world is fast changing in the entertainment field. Artiste also should show some innovation in presentation of play and dialogue diction.

Prakash felt the need of employment opportunities for theatre artistes on par with sportspersons in Government jobs to encourage the Telugu Theatre.

Borra Naren, also an artiste having more than 30-year experience in social theatre felt the need of fully equipped auditoriums for better productions. "The Andhra Pradesh Film, TV and Theatre Development Corporation should think of constructing auditoriums at least one in each district. Then only the real visible 'development' will happen in the Telugu Drama. Simply conducting competitions and arranging some dramas will never yield good results for the development in Theatre activity. So, I feel the Governments will think in this direction," said Naren.

"The production units also should concentrate to compete with the other media like OTT, TV channels, Social media without disturbing the original flavour of 'Drama'. For this, training is essential. Unfortunately, Andhra Pradesh is not having any drama institutions except in Andhra University. I feel it is necessary to have more institutes to have good training in acting, script writing, direction and set & lighting design," Naren emotionally expressed. He concluded with the words that without basic infrastructure the theatre will never develop.