SRISHTI ARTS FESTIVAL
The Srishti Arts Festival is an annual event that provides every student at NiBS the opportunity to showcase his or her talent and creative abilities. At NiBS, we believe in converting every challenge into an opportunity. Thus, with the onset of Covid 19 protocols and distance learning, the festival went online this year. The children’s performances were beautifully encapsulated in the form of video recordings, which were premiered on YouTube.
While the children of Ankur depicted a ‘Smile Tree’, which spread smiles all around, the Pallav’s shared the story of a caterpillar who earned many a friend as he gave away his shoes. The students of Classes I to V presented a range of plays from Akbar-Birbal stories to tales about heroes and villains caught in the midst of the pandemic.
A special aspect of the Junior festival was that our children got the opportunity to work with leading theatre experts who curated and directed the theatre performances. These included Karan Arora, writer and director at ShowSha Baaz Carvan WOW, a theatre company; Jigyasa Taneja, an award-winning filmmaker; and Feisal Alkazi, a theatre and television director, writer and educationist.
The specialisation students of Classes VI to VIII presented a plethora of musical and dance performances across Indian and Western music genres. The musical performances were based on the theme, ‘The Circle of Time’, and centred around the four ‘praharas’ of the day.
The students of Class IX performed a Hindi play titled ‘Ajab Samay Ki Gazab Kahaani’ on the theme of finding ‘Freedom in Confinement’ and depicted the power of unity in times of hardship and challenges. Taking ahead the same theme, Class XI presented a series of monologues by renowned personalities like Nelson Mandela, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Anne Frank and Hellen Keller and of fictional characters including Pi Patel from Life of Pi and Robinson Crusoe.
The students’ performances in the plays were exemplary as they breathed life into the characters that they portrayed. The plays were beautifully embellished with melodious songs and beautiful dances that merged with the storyline and mesmerised one and all. The sound effects and elaborate backdrops enlivened the play while the colourful costumes and props put together by the Visual Arts specialisation students and parents added to the impact of the show. The children, parents and teachers came together, in a ‘never before’ kind of collaboration to make this festival a huge success and in keeping with our founding principle of encouraging each child to be their best, every student was extended the opportunity to contribute to the event in a significant way.
Another highlight of the Srishti festival was an especially curated virtual Art Exhibition, which showcased each child’s artwork on a microsite on the School website. A series of daily art challenges titled, ‘The Picasso Challenge’, kept the children and parents engaged as they designed and styled WFH wardrobes, created new and novel workspaces at home, crafted sculptures using objects from shelves, cupboards and closets, doodled and captured ‘different shades of blue’ !
