KARACHI: The National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) will organise a Women’s Performing Arts Festival from April 25 to May 10. This was announced by the academy’s CEO Junaid Zuberi at a press conference on Friday evening.

He said it is for the first time that Napa is holding such a festival for which open call submissions were invited.

“It is a joint production of our music and theatre departments. They have jointly designed and curated it. The idea is to celebrate women artists and practitioners. It will last for 16 days in which performances will be held on a daily basis. They include 13 theatre plays, six musical performances and two dance performances,” he said.

He added the academy will make it into a national level annual feature.

Some of the participants were present at the presser who informed the rather thin number of media persons about what they’ll do at the event.

Six musical and two dance performances and 13 theatre plays will be staged at the 16-day event

Sheema Kermani said her group, Tehreek-i-Niswan which is the oldest performing arts group of Pakistan, will do a multi-media performance. “It will have stories of real life characters. It is about those women of our country who were artists but remained unsung and died without being remembered.”

Nighat Chaudhary said, “My performance will feature kathak elements.” She also mentioned a performance called purdah, which she will do at the event.

Nabila Bano said she’s a singer and at the festival she will be singing her originally composed songs alongside some famous English tracks. She will present some ghazals with new musical arrangements as well.

Napa’s head of theatre department Afreen Seher said she’s happy that the first-ever women’s performing arts festival in the country is being held.

“Although it’s a collaboration between the theatre and music departments, it has many kinds of performances — poetry, vocal, dance, silent storytelling. We have tried to keep it diverse. The festival is exclusively for women. Our criterion for the plays was that it must have a woman director, the protagonist has to be a woman and it should be centred on women. So the musicians are all women, the directors are all women. Another thing we’re proud of is that the festival has six original plays,” she added.

The academy’s head of the music department, Hamza Jafri, said diverse programming has been arranged for the event. “It has classical, folk, modern, western, jazz and instrumental etc. We are bringing artists from all the genres.”

Napa’s faculty member Attiya Dawood said, “As a jury member I can tell you that we have worked with honesty.”

Sabiha Zia, Sadaf, Ritika, Naheed Qureshi, Mehreen Hasan, Aasiya and Seerat Jafri also spoke.

Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2024