Outreach

BLT has a long and highly admired track record in outreach activity. Positioning ourselves as Community Theatre came naturally soon after inception in the 60s. The Bangalore public saw BLT in many roles: working with schools and colleges, fundraising for causes, lending a hand in other performance events, developing shows for public awareness… Fifty years later, old-time Bangaloreans still talk about a compelling show produced in association with the Police Commissioner’s office on traffic consciousness. And who can forget BLT’s major contributions to setting up ADA’s Ranga Mandira?

Some Highlights

• The 1970-71 BLT production of the new play by Badal Sircar,Evem Indrajit, was the first fundraising event to contribute to the Prime Minister’s Fund for the Bangla refugee crisis.
• In 1993 the group initiated an annual Festival of Short Plays (SHORTS), aimed at promoting theatre activity among the college and youth population. The theme of the annual festival was New Directions, and it was aimed at presenting new faces on stage, new writers, new directors, new techniques and, in fact, anything new that a college team wished to show others but didn’t have the means to do.
• In 2003, when Sanket Trust was half-way in its Ranga Shankara theatre project, BLT conceived and coordinated a festival of five plays to create public awareness about the project and the need for a technically sound theatre space in Bangalore. The festival attracted the best of Bangalore’s theatre talent. It was also the occasion for the staging ofEmil’s Enemies, a new play by the American playwright, Douglas Huff. The performance of the play at this festival had two major credits. It was the play’s international premiere outside the USA. And it was the first play in English directed by M.S. Sathyu.

With the emergence of the Academy of Theatre Arts we can expect outreach activity from BLT to get even stronger over the years.