Presented by The British Council,JSW,The Royal Court Theatre and RAGE, Writers’ BLOC is the only new writing training program for emerging playwrights in India, which puts the script at the center of the creative process of making theatre.
The project began in 2002 and 32 new and exciting playwrights have worked with on the projects since then, creating 32 exciting contemporary plays.
On April 21st, at the Jindal’s guesthouse in Vasind, we kick off the second residential WRITERS’ BLOC – 4 workshop with our selected 14 playwrights. After the completion of the first workshop in October 2014, the playwrights were given four months to write the first draft of a new play. These drafts will now be fine-tuned, altered & improved over this ten-day session with our three brilliant mentors Vivienne Franzmann, Richard Twyman, Carl Miller from the UK.
Aside from our mentors, we also have some wonderful actors from Bombay: Faezeh Jalali,Irawati Karnik,Karan Pandit, Nadir Khan,Prerna Chawla, Rajit Kapur,Sumeet Vyas, Shernaz Patel participating in the workshop. They will be working and collaborating with the playwrights, not just to read their scripts aloud, but also to improvise scenes, hot seat characters etc. Various exercises have been designed to assist the playwrights and their work.
The playwrights: Asad Husaain (Hindi),Arpita Biswas (English),Ashwini Kumar Chakre (Hindi),Meera Sitaraman (English),Nandini Krishnan (English),Nandini Da Cunha (English),Omkar Kulkarni (Marathi),Rahul Rai (Hindi),Ramneek Singh (English/Hindi),Saggherr Loadhii (Marathi),Shardul Saraf (Marathi),Shivam Sharma (English/Hindi),Sunandha Raghunathan (English/Tamil),Swati Simha (Hindi/English).
The workshop schedule starts from 21st April and ends by lunchtime on 29th April in Vasind,Maharashtra.