South Asian Theatre Festival at Riverside Theatre on 24th and 25th November 2016

South Asian Theatre Festival is first of its kind to support community based theatre groups in NSW. There are many South Asian community theatre groups who are running plays for many decades. Nautanki Theatre will work along such organisations and help them keep practicing theatre as performing arts with better theatre resources, education and knowledge sharing and a cross-cultural exchange.

For the first year we have selected 3 plays to include in the 1st South Asian Theatre Festival. A Bangla play directed by Asim Das will represent Bengalis from India and Bangladesh, a Tamil play directed by N.K. Srini that will find common lingual identity of migrants from Southern India and Sri Lanka and a Marathi play directed by Napoleon Almeida who has Goan background. Company will be presenting 3 plays back to back at Riverside Theatre in Parramatta for two evenings.

Entry to this festival is free however audience shall evaluate the performance and can pay as they experience. Nautanki Theatre is introducing the concept of Pay-as-you-Think. Selling tickets at a fixed rate is a known concept in theatre where producers sell the show as a commodity with an attached price tag that varies with seating space. More the money more the benefits offered. Nautanki Theatre wants to reverse the cycle there by shifting the power to the audience to evaluate and accordingly pay what they think the show is worth of. However paying is not mandatory. Along with Nautanki’s presenting partner Riverside Theatre we are working with South Asian communities based in greater Sydney area to roll out this model. This model is aimed to slow down commercialism of arts in Australia starting at grass-roots level.

Nautanki Theatre acknowledges the encouragement of Multicultural NSW, Parramatta City Council and Lions Club of Australia for coming forward to support this fantastic community engagement for 2 days i.e. Thursday 24th and Friday 25th November 2016 at 7.30 pm.