T! Play, the street theatre contest of TISS is back for the second year

A performance from the previous edition

Here's a treat for lovers of a now beaten genre of theatre. This Saturday, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences will organise T! Play, an open competition for street theatre. The theme is to cover any socially relevant issue and would involve not more than 10 members in a team. This is the second year of the competition; it was introduced last year for the Manthan festival, the annual festival of Tata Institute of Social Sciences that is organised by the school of Human Resource Management and Labour Studies department.

A performance from the previous edition

Nancy Nayak, a member of the organising team, says that after the success of the debut year, they have decided to go with the street play contest again and are expecting interesting participation. "Last year, we had nine teams in the contest with plays on seven-eight different issues like LGBT, domestic violence and caste based discrimination. A team which had a strong story on gay rights won," she says.

She says that she hopes that this initiative would help popularise street-theatre among the students of Mumbai, which is now a dying art. Manthan's core committee member, Sumit Kumar, however feels that the situation of street theatre is not so gloomy and is now a rage in many educational institutes and hopes that it will translate into mainstream attention.