The Shadipur Natak Utsav describes itself as “India’s first community-curated theatre festival”. Residents of west Delhi’s Shadipur area, the locality in which festival organiser and venue Studio Safdar is based, select the plays. The curators for the first instalment, in 2019, were businessmen Iqbal Hussain and Naseem Akhtar, gardener Kamlesh Kumari, Hindi teacher Poonam Rajput and tea seller Ravi Kumar Otwal. In 2025, the festival is back again, running over two weekends, September 12–14 and September 19–21, with a fresh line-up of performances, reaffirming its community-driven ethos.
After taking part in a workshop on the concept of curation by theatre practitioner Sanjna Kapoor, they chose seven productions from five cities: Natak Company’s Kabutar Ja Ja Ja from Pune, Natomon Natya Sanstha’s Maccoman, The Power Play from Kolkata, Pandies’ Theatre’s Medea and Peshevar MaujKhor’s Ek Square Meter Khushi from New Delhi, Qissa Kothi’s Romeo Ravidas and Juliet Devi and Red Nose Entertainment’s Shakuntalam – Agar Pura Kar Paye Toh! from Mumbai, and The Kachra Collective’s Material Mala from Hyderabad.
A curtain-raiser performance by leading theatre artists from the capital, including Dhwani Vij, Gunjan Gupta and Dhruv Rai, Neel Sengupta, and Poonam Girdhani, preceded each play. Among the other unique aspects of the Shadipur Natak Utsav was that the entry fee was only Rs 20 for Shadipur residents as opposed to the standard rate of Rs 200. Local residents hosted each of the participating theatre groups for dinner at their homes, after the shows.
The festival returned, after a two-year pandemic-induced hiatus, for its second instalment in 2022. It was held over three weekends, on 12 and 13 November, 19 and 20 November, and 26 and 27 November in 2022. The first weekend featured performances by Anubhuti – the Dramatics Club of Janki Devi Memorial College, Delhi and the Mumbai-based Rang Pravah Theatre Group. Performances over the second weekend included Kolkata-based dancer Shruti Ghosh’s “Khol Do”, based on the Saddat Hassan Manto story of the same name. The final weekend saw performances by Santoshpur Anuchintan from Kolkata and Shankhnad Natya Manch from Madhya Pradesh.
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Source: India.com
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