Devendra raj ankur biography of williams

In this context, it becomes more meaningful to study some of the actual experiments with fiction by theatre directors to see how fiction has fared in contemporary theatre. An early practice was to adapt a play from a specific work of fiction. Many writers adapted their own fiction into plays. Nearer home, Mannu Bhandari adapted her novel Mahabhoj into a play.

If the novels and playscripts by these two writers are read together, one finds little difference except in their structure. In other words, the writers transformed their novels into plays by either eliminating the descriptive passages or presenting them as part of dialogue. This is true of most directors and playwrights who adapt novels into plays.

Of the many who have used this technique in Hindi theatre, I shall mention only a few. The point I am devendra raj ankur biography of williams is that when fiction was used on stage, no new form emerged. Of course, a long debate ensued on whether the novel was more powerful in its original form or in the adapted version. However, these experiments and those preceding them are historically important because they succeeded in providing direction for the emergence of a new form.

But there have also been many cases where a director has given an entirely new, different, and creative twist to a play inspired by a particular story or novel. Since neither play is an exact rendition of the story in dialogue form, they hold their own as independent creations. Jagannath tells the tragic tale of a simple person against the backdrop of rural Bengal and Chandrama Singh urf Chamku unfolds itself in the dialect and locale of eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Interestingly, though both plays end on a similar note, the ending is different from that of the original story. Each play follows a different sequence of events in reaching the conclusion. Both scripts evolved in the process of production and were published after the plays had been staged. Two Hindi writers made it the basis for their plays and two entirely different plays emerged from the exercise.

If one were to read Khoji afresh today, it would be difficult to imagine that such experiments could have been made with the folk tale. Tanvir based the play on a Detha story called Fitrati Chor, but what emerged was something totally different from the folk tale. The prime reason for this was ethnic or perhaps geographical. The Chhatisgarhi cast shaped the play with their unique talent, style and language.

The incidents in the first half of the play have little to do with the plot of the story. It is here that the creative process begins, as the drama within the story is unfolded before the audience. In the process, the story breaks free from the constraint of being presented as a theatrical adaptation. And this freedom opens up a number of alternatives and possibilities.

For instance, the artist cannot tie himself down to a fixed framework because the story is, first and foremost, a descriptive medium. So the first challenge is how to depict the descriptions on stage. Should one just speak them out? Or should one first convert the descriptive elements into emotions and then act them out? Or should a situation or ambience be created to express them?

The artist has to weigh all these alternatives and, every time, seek a new path. This becomes possible because, unlike drama, no two stories have the same structure. A study of the structure of Sanskrit, Greek or Shakespearean drama will bear this out. But in the case of fiction, even two stories by the same writer differ in form and structure.

The challenges posed by the form and content of stories are well known and I have discussed them elsewhere. To reiterate these challenges — what to do with a story told in the third person, with a wholly descriptive one, or one entirely in the form of dialogue — is not necessary. Suffice it to say that having worked on the relationship between story and theatre for a quarter of a century, I have come across many issues, only some of which I have indicated here.

In this essay, I have attempted to take note of the intellectual, theoretical and practical aspects of staging fiction. This has been done not just in Hindi theatre but in several Indian languages, and elsewhere in the world too. It is neither possible nor necessary to elaborate on all of them.

Devendra raj ankur biography of williams: Director of National School

But there is one problem that every director faces — how to condense a long work of fiction into a play of just an hour or two? Directors have adopted different methods to tackle the problem of editing without compromising the basic text. The first, Horiwas an adaptation by Vishnu Prabhakar. A structuralist understanding of these stories would be posited, with the help of Deleuze's "How do we recognise structuralism.

Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms o Storytelling is one of the most ancient art forms, and continues to this day as a vibrant part of culture throughout the world.

However, the traditional Indian custom of passing down epics and village folklore from one generation to the next through storytelling is slowly dying due to increasing globalization and the all-pervasive media. At one time, stories were a part of the day-to-day teaching-learning processes, but in the current educational system, storytelling has become a lost art; it is considered nothing more than a leisure activity.

This workshop on storytelling and creative writing was organized by Katha Manch to reinvent the art of storytelling and story writing. Katha Manch, a group dedicated to the use of stories as a pedagogical tool, aspires to fill the Language and Language Teaching Participant Profile The participants included 50 students of class IX and X, and teachers from 25 schools of Hardoi District, where Kusuma Foundation has been carrying out various inter A review of traditional curricula for literacy and the Language Arts indicates a paucity of focus and opportunities for diasporic Asian Indian American children AIA or any minoritized youth to learn about their heritage culture to an appreciable degree.

The first author conceptualized and designed the Kahani Literacy Project model i. It was posited that the opportunity for students to engage with ideas from home, in a pedagogic space without fear of disparagement, would foster respect. As the Funds of Knowledge [1] are recognized and incorporated into literacy instruction, the adolescent writer acquires TCRK.

Indian English literature is the Cinderella of literature in English.

Devendra raj ankur biography of williams: All new experince of

Indian drama in English is the Cinderella of Indian English literature. A recent bibliography of Indian writing in English1 lists as many as separate titles under poetry, under fiction and a partly under drama. Actually of these three forms, poetry and drama began their careers around the same time, with Henry Derozio? Since then, the? Indian drama in English was unable to grow similarly and bear rich fruit.

The study analyses Sohni Mahiwal, the renowned Punjabi folktale, by applying Greimas Actantial model for structural analysis. The purpose of this study is to explore the narrative structure and discover the character functions based on the model. Folktales are considered the simplest and oldest form of stories embedded in the local cultures.

They broadly refer to orally transmitted, traditional narratives that carry cultural information. The findings show that all the major actantial categories proposed by Greimas such as subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, and opponent have been depicted in the selected folktale. The analysis revealed that many characters were found involved in several actant classes simultaneously.

Journal For the Study of Peace and Conflict, Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Kahani ka Rangamanch Satyabrata Rout. Rubina Masum. Telling tall tales: The figure of the storyteller in select Bengali fiction Aritra Basu.

A workshops on storytelling and creative writing Yashika Chandna. IJAR Indexing. We brothers and sisters also kept on travelling with him and continued our study in various places; in Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana… When we were in U. P, I developed a passion to read stories. My elder brother was teaching in Delhi University when I was studying in class 9th in Agra.

During the holidays and vacations when he used to come home I request him to bring Hindi storybooks from the University library. So every time he had a heavy load of books for me, which I had to finish within a definite time span. Apart from books I developed habit of reading Hindi magazines, like: Sarika, Dharmayug. These reading habits developed my understanding for stories, which flourished in my college days Interview of D.

They are: His childhood inclination for devendra raj ankur biography of williams stories. Hindi literature as the prime subject in M. A and the dissertation. The theatre training in the drama school in Delhi. Exploration: Being a professional theatre director, he began to search an expression that fuses these two mediums strongly; theatre and stories.

The prime rule of this genre theatre is to narrate the story without having dramatizing it. In a way it is the story, which is visually narrated, or in other wards; the viewers see the events while listening. In he tried his first ever expression: Teen Ekaant, written by the noted short story writer; Nirmal Varma but could only present in as a NSD repertory Company production.

These three stories were presented one after the other by these actors. The show was opened in the studio theatre at Ravindra Bhawan; the then camp office of the NSD repertory. There was a huge response to the initial six shows as it was a different kind of expression other than the conventional theatre. Though narrative style of presentation is not a new phenomenon in Indian theatre, it was restricted to traditional and folk theatre only.

Its potential energy and multiple dimensions have never been explored and experimented prior to the presentation of stories by D. The experience of the viewers in a story presentation is like that of seeing a happening narrated in front of them. This is an added extension to the psyche of the audience. Out of many criticism and reactions two are important to understand the psycology of the spectatorship.

First, the audience accepted it as a new expression and for the second, it seemed to be a kind of theatre that immerged out of the scarcity of dramatic texts in Hindi language. To some extent these statements were true. As a reason Hindi theatre mainly depends upon translation and adaptation of plays from other languages; Eastern and Western.

Apart from that a new out look was developed among the directors and practitioners to find the expressions with the help of different artistic mediums in post-Alkazian-theatre Alkazi left NSD as a director in and B. V Karanth became the head of the drama school. Alkazi is known to the world of theatre as a strict disciplinarian director of Text and Characters.

But some of his students and followers tried to practice and experiment different kinds of theatres, which is more flexible and interdisciplinary. Directors like; Habib Tanvir, B. V Karanth, B. As a result different genre of plays and productions were surfaced in Indian Theatre after The specific characteristics of presenting a story is that, while in a well-made play the actor carries a definite character and behaves as the first person, in story presentation the actor performs the role of narrator and talks to the audience directly as a third person.

In this case he never possessed by the strong and rigid convention of characterization. Sometimes the actor splits his personality into two parts and holds the character in one and narrates through the other, shifting from third person to first person. One must have experienced this way of narrating the stories from our epics in folk and traditional theatres.

In Pandavani, Pala, Khayaal, etc. Here the performer never improvises the text as a folk artiste rather improvises the characters, switching from one to the other as the story moves on. Unlike folk performances, a well-written text is narrated in Kahani ka Rangamanch, the way it is penned. The popularity of Kahani ka Rangamanch spread widely and Ankur was invited by various theatre groups to direct stories for them.

In one of his most famous presentations, Khana Vadosh came out with flying colours that decides the style of story presentation. A horde of younger generation actors and directors adopted this theatre professionally and Kahani ka Rangamanch gained popularity as a major expression of theatre. It was included in the academic syllabus of the Drama School in Delhi and in other theatre institutions in the country.

Specifically with the students of National School of Drama, the stories were presented every year from to regularly.

Devendra raj ankur biography of williams: After our opening show

The presentation included a number of short stories of different writers with a common theme. It was given a named as Katha-Collage, collection of stories. Katha-Collage formed its own method after years of practices. They are: No alternation of the text and form of the story. Massage of the story is more important than anything else. The descriptive part of the text is to be narrated by different actors time to time.

An empty space for performers without any stage props until essential. No illustration of text into visuals. Inter-changeability of actor and character Presentation from a third persons point of view. Process of Presentation: To through lights on the process of story presentation, Prof. Ankur narrated his experience on directing the stories with the students of National School of Drama.

After reading almost a hundred stories in groups we usually shortlist approximately twenty, and out of them the final stories are selected depending upon the possibilities of presentation. After the selection is over we distribute the stories in groups of 4 to 5 actors in each. The groups can be formed depending upon the number of actors and stories.

Now it becomes the responsibility of the student-actors to prepare a first draft of presentation with the help of the director, who has to interpret the stories. In presenting the stories the director has to keep patience to see how the groups react to the situations with the condition that: the stories should not be altered. Descriptive part has to be distributed equally among the actors.

The actors should try an empty space without any stage props and complicated design. After a week the director and other member of actors in the group review the first draft. After a thorough mind storming discussion on the first draft presentation, we note down the problems and allow suggestions and try to overcome them in the second draft.

Sometimes I use to tell my actors to try different means in another way by forgetting the first draft. The second draft is again reviewed and finally the play is evolved in the third draft.