Youth Performing Arts Festival: Rock bands strike a chord

LAHORE: Underground rock bands brought the Ninth Rafi Peer Youth Performing Arts Festival to life on Saturday as Music Night drew its most appreciative audience so far on the fourth day of the festival.

Young people screamed and banged their heads in the Open Air Theatre at the Alhamra Cultural Complex as eight rock bands played late into the night. The crowd was loud and energetic, though noticeably smaller than at previous festivals organised by the RPT.

The acts included the duo Sherzad and Shahzore, Dionysus, Tak-a-Tak, Chapterx, Preaching Hypocrites, V8 and Plectra. Preaching Hypocrites stole the show with their cover of Aerials by System of a Down, while Chapterx and Tak-a-Tak also elicited good responses from the crowd.

Earlier in the day, the festival hosted a variety of film, theatre and dance performances. Two short films by NCA Films carried strong political messages. The first, a documentary, exposes the broken promises of the government; the second, a fictional story, shows how common folk are denied access to the higher levels of power.

Directed by Fauzia Uzaifay, Gutter Gate depicts the lives of children who live on the street, begging for a living. The gritty footage, backed by Punjabi music, shows them playing in heaps of garbage and filth, with little prospect for improvement through education or employment. It exposes the unfulfilled promise of free education for all and a literate Pakistan. The film has a serious message, but past that, it has little in the way of direction.

The second film, Darbaan, directed by Mir Sikandar Ali, revolves around a student photographer and a darbaan, or porter, at one of the nine gates of an unnamed fort. The film begins with the student taking photographs of the broken head of a statue. He wants to enter, but the darbaan does not let him go inside the fort to meet the king. The student doesn’t give up and decides to wait outside, spending years trying to convince the darbaan to let him in, but to no avail. Meanwhile, he hears the tyrant king torturing his people inside the fort. The main message of the play comes when the students tells the darbaan that the people should rise up against their ruler’s brutality. But in the end, the student dies outside the fort, and the aged darbaan is replaced.

A recreation of Franz Kafka’s Before the Law, the film was shot in 2008 as a class project by 15 students. Moments in the film betrayed the actors’ and director’s amateur status, such as the repeated glances straight into the camera. And the message seemed somewhat lost on the small and confused audience.

Next up were a mime, two plays and a dance by students of the University of Central Punjab (UCP). The mime focuses on a young couple separated when the husband, a Pakistan Army officer, has to go to war. The performance conveys the incredible sacrifices that soldiers make when they fight for their country, and the loss suffered by their families. The female protagonist successfully portrayed this grief and loss.

This was followed by a comedy about four men chasing after a girl in their neighbourhood. In the end she reveals that she likes someone else. The clichéd plot and low-brow jokes seemed to have been inspired by Lollywood.

Six UCP students then did an energetic break dance to rap, rock and pop songs for about 20 minutes.

The final play, Des Kay Ajnabi [Strangers in Their Own Land], laments the lack of interest in Urdu among Pakistani youths. It accuses the media and schools of confusing youths so that they are unable to distinguish between western culture and ‘true’ Pakistani culture.

At the end of the theatre performances, Imran Peerzada of the Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop said that it was important for young people to portray what was troubling them and their country through art, theatre, music and dance. He was also critical of the “immature audience” and urged them to “behave like grown ups”.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 28^th, 2010.