KARACHI: The Arts Council of Pakistani will host a month-long international theatre festival in September, announced council’s president Ahmed Shah on Monday evening.

In all, 27 Pakistani and seven groups from other parts of the world will take part in the event from Sept 8 to Oct 8. They will present plays in Urdu, English, Turkish, German, Persian, Sinhala, Punjabi and Sindhi languages.

Speaking at a press conference, Mr Shah said the media has played an important role in creating awareness about the council’s efforts by virtue of which events such as the Urdu Conference and the Youth Festival have become huge brands.

“Pakistan often gets bad press around the world as if we’re all terrorists. I have just been to the US, and I can assure you that we are a more civilised people than them. I can go to New Karachi or DHA Phase VIII at midnight, but when I was in the US staying at a hotel in Hollywood, I was told not to step out my hotel after 10pm. Crime is everywhere in the world.

“But they [western countries] use film and theatre as their tools and celebrate their artists. Look at our neighbouring country, India. Javed Akhtar is a good songwriter but we have 50 better serious poets than him. If they had Pandit Ravi Shankar, we had Ustad Rais Khan. It’s just how they package their product,” he said.

The month-long event will begin on Sept 8

He said that the Arts Council had created a platform from where not just artists representing and doing work in the city and province but all over Pakistan could showcase their talent. “Our purpose is cultural diplomacy.”

Mr Shah told the media that the council had been doing theatre festivals at a local level.

“This one is an international festival. Now we have moved out of that boundary. As our collective responsibility we have gathered artists from all over the world. A couple of months ago, we had invited an American movement teacher to teach our students. In Karachi she used to happily move around in places such as Lyari. She went back to America and became our ambassador. So now we have seven theatre groups coming to take part in the festival.

“We started working on it three months back but got to learn that international groups require invites at least a year prior. This is the reason more than 10 groups couldn’t come because they didn’t have the time to generate funding from their governments or the private sector. This is our first such endeavour, but this too will end up being the biggest festival in Pakistan. Among others, we have two plays from Turkiye, one from the US and one from Iran,” he explained.

Actor Sajid Hasan lauded the efforts that the council puts in to arrange a variety of events. He said he’s proud of the fact that he’s part of the team that’s organised the festival.

Munawwar Saeed, emphasising the importance of theatre, recalled the time when at Muslim University, Aligarh, he used to learn theatre.

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2023