As a part of the Seventeenth Founder’s Week celebrations the Vivek High School, Sector 38, Chandigarh, the students of class III transformed the stage into the lively, dramatic and poetic time of Akbar’s reign, to perform ‘Kissa-e-Akbar Birbal’. This play, staged on 6 November, 2012, is an adaptation of three stories from the legendary Akbar –Birbal folklore. The play is directed by Ravinder Kumar and this directorial endeavour is supported by school teachers Rajinder Singh as the music director, Ragini Kulkarni as the choreographer and the class III teachers as the stage co-ordinators.
The play was a wonderful experiment, wherein there was no formal script to be learnt. The director encouraged the children to come up with their own dialogues and helped build the play as they rehearsed.
Cleverly interwoven into the play were songs and dances that enlivened the narrative. Taking inspiration from the puppet dances of Rajasthan and the Alla Udal form of music of Uttar Pradesh, the dancers weaved their magic