TV reality shows bring North-East to fore

North East became the latest talent scouting ground for reality shows on television channels in the past year with a view to capturing greater share of hitherto untapped viewer ship market of this region.

The region’s singing talents led the brigade from the front and stamped their complete domination in all the major reality-based singing talent hunt shows on television.

From Amit Paul in Sony TV’s ‘’Indian Idol III’’ to Joy Chakraborty in Zee TV’s “Saregamapa World Challenge’’ to little Anamika in again Zee TV’s kids’’ competition, NE’s warriors kept the region’s flag flying high. The region has rich music tradition in the form of folk songs and traditional music genres.

And not to forget, the undisputed bastion of western music is in the North East itself in the Meghalaya capital Shillong. Despite top international music stars thronging Shillong and addition of names like Scorpions and Eric Martin to the elite list of performers this year, the region’s love for music continued to elude the rest of the country for some strange reason. But with the arrival of the music-based reality shows on television and their latest trend of choosing the best through SMS and telephone voting, NE emerged as a virgin ground for these shows to compete for greater viewership share. The North Eastern states’’ great bonding had already come to the fore during the ‘’historical’’ win of the region’s first reality TV hero Debojit Saha when he bagged the Zee TV’s ‘’Saregamapa Voice of India’’ title last year. As the region voted for Debojit in huge numbers despite limited mobile phone density and economic constraints compared to other prosperous parts of the country from where his competitors hailed, the show producers sat up and took note. And that single instance of display of ‘’patriotism’’ by the people of NE turned out to be the commercial success mantra for the reality shows. And thus, year 2007 saw every show worth its reputation have at least one participant from the region.

Meanwhile, for the first time, the Forum for Laboratory Theatres of Manipur in collaboration with the Directorate of Art and Culture, Government of Manipur would be organising a fortnight long National Interdisciplinary Performance Workshop for Young female dancers of the North East India at Imphal The workshop is to be sponsored by the North Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre, Dimapur.

In connection with the proposed workshop, president of Forum for Laboratory Theatres Dr Lokendra Arambam said that the objective of the workshop is first to inculcate amongst young female dancers of the North East India the values and principles of contemporary dance art under the guidance of the internationally acclaimed dancer Astab Deboo for a week.

Dr Arambam, under whose supervision the whole project would be carried out, said that the experiences of the exercise shall be utilised to synthesize with the other performance principles of contemporary theatre, ritual, poetry, music, visual arts, films and human rights experiences to introduce the novel performance form of the dance-theatre in the North East.

During the workshop, experienced local resource persons would interact with the participants which would comprise of 13 artistes from Manipur and 7 other artistes from other North Eastern States like Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Nagaland.

The workshop shall also have film study session with Biren Das, a resource person from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata.

The concern for this interdisciplinary performance is to empower women to understand conflict, respect human rights and enable artistes to intervene in social and political issues of the day, Dr Arambam added.

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