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How I’ll spend my summer vacation

With a nine-day fiesta at the NCPA, DNA explores how parents can wean children away from the idiot box.

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If malls, restaurants, the Xbox and the idiot box are claiming a fair share of your child’s vacation time, then Summer Fiesta at the NCPA could be a good alternative.

Besides plays and children’s film screenings, the nine-day fiesta, starting today, has an interesting line-up of creative workshops and fun activities.

“Besides mall hopping and PlayStations, kids need to step out to stimulate their minds and senses. And more often than not, they are happy to be given alternatives. It is for parents and those around them to provide children with better and more creative alternatives,” says Deepa Gahlot, programming head for Indian film and theatre at the NCPA, who has put the fiesta together for children between the ages of seven and twelve.

The fiesta aims to introduce children to the performing arts and make them realise their importance in personality development. It also aims at making them participate in workshops which are simply fun and not unnecessarily competitive.

“Parents feel safer with things that show results. They make kids work for results. So whether it’s scoring well in exams or asking their children to sing or dance in front of relatives, everything’s for showing off,” says Shaili Sathyu, production designer and honorary vice president, Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). Sathyu will conduct a workshop on Hindi poetry through improvisation and games.

She feels it’s important to treat Hindi as a standalone language and not just as a subject that needs to be passed in examinations. “I’d be using traditional rhymes, folk songs, and poems by known and anonymous Hindi writers, but the focus is not on grammar — it’s on letting children connect with the language,” she says.

Besides such workshops, Santosh Sivan’s Halo (a film about a little girl roaming the streets of Mumbai to find her lost pet), Badmaash Kahin Ka (a Hindi play), Chutkan Ki Mahabharat (a Hindi film) and Bhim and Hanuman (a puppet show), are part of the fiesta.

“Parents are busy and they want children to be off their hair specially if a child is wild, but there’s no need to be judgmental about this. As a parent, it is important that you help create opportunities for your children that are more enriching than just watching television,” says Manisha Lakhe, a journalist and  mother of a 12-year-old.

Lakhe will take a workshop where she will provoke children to use the power of imagination. So whether it’s asking them to imagine a conversation between their chappals, taking them on an imaginary trip about a virtual guest visiting their home, or making them travel to a non-existent place, her workshop will “lead children to simply think”.

Other workshops will be on acting, theatre, music, exercises involving diction, projection and enunciation through prose and poetry, creative writing and more.

One of the workshops will be taken by Tarun Singh Negi, who will involve children in theatre games with hidden messages. “The idea is to open their creative channels and make them come out of their conscious self,” says Negi, whose workshop will use theatre as a tool for personal growth for children.

So, if your child is fed up of attending one hobby class after another, then these creatively stimulating and non-competitive workshops might just catch their fancy. As Gahlot puts it, “Sometimes it’s important to just let them be.”

The Summer Fiesta starts today and will be on till May 30 at various venues within the NCPA complex, Nariman Point.

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