Alive and kicking - till 2012

The Arts Council is booked solid for the next 15 months - who says culture is dead?

KARACHI:

With the exception of Ramzan and Muharram, Karachi’s Arts Council is booked solid till next year. For anyone who still trots out the lament that culture is dying here, think again.

“Producers from all over Pakistan have booked the venue till 2012, which is a great thing for theatre artists and for the people of Karachi too,” says the council’s Ahmad Shah.

Oh, but it wasn’t always like this. Last year, around 20 plays and a few concerts were cancelled or postponed due to the violence after certain high-profile killings. And indeed, there is ever the risk of violence flaring up again. “Sabz” was reduced to 13 plays instead of 14 because of the recent chaos in Karachi.

But now things are picking up. From “The Office” by Firefly Theatre in the first week of this May to an Entertainment 360 production booked for August 30 to September 30, 2012, nearly 13 shows have been slotted out over the next 15 months and most of the producers are not from Karachi.

Take, for example, Abdullah Farhatullah, a Lahore-based theatre director who received back-to-back standing ovations for his directorial venture “Sabz”. “Karachi is definitely the biggest market for theatre productions and the audience here is very mature and eager to watch,” he told The Express Tribune. He is cautious about categorising the solid bookings as a permanent change. A constant theatre audience has yet to be developed. This can only happen when there are back-to-back plays. “It took us five years to develop a theatre audience in Islamabad because it’s a small city with only a handful of people interested,” he explained, adding however that as Karachi is the biggest city of the country, if done right, we could have a proper theatre audience in no time.

Thus, there are challenges. Waqas Bukhari is a Karachi-based producer of Moulin Rouge and Bombay Dreams fame. He points out that Karachi is a huge but difficult market. “Karachi is cosmopolitan and in order to create awareness about your play in the city you need a large marketing budget because someone in Nazimabad might not know what is happening in the Arts Council. However, if you manage to market the play, you will definitely make a profit.”

What impresses Bukhari, however, is the willingness of Karachi’s audience, something that he does not see in Lahore or Islamabad. “Around 10,000 to 12,000 people attended Bombay Dreams, which is a big thing for a city that is full of people from such different social classes and ethnic groups. Now that a new wave of contemporary theatre has taken up the city, the audience will only get bigger.”

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2011.