KARACHI, March 14: The National Academy of Performing Arts’ second art festival will be held from March 21 to April 9 at the academy’s auditorium.

This was announced by artistic director of the Napa Repertory Theatre Zain Ahmed at a press conference on Thursday.

Mr Ahmed said last year’s festival spanned 11 days whereas the second edition would run for 20 days. The reason for it was that the academy wanted to expand the scope of the event by adding more variety to it, which was why this year apart from theatre plays and music concerts, a children’s programme and an acting workshop had also been included in the festival. He said the main purpose of the event was to provide talented youngsters with an opportunity to engage in a noncommercial activity. He told the media that the academy intended to further expand the art festival in the near future and turn it first into a national and then into an international event for which work was being done.

Giving out the details of this year’s festival, Mr Ahmed said there would be seven plays, two of which (Yasmina Reza’s ‘Carnage’ directed by Nida Butt and ‘Man on a Black Horse’ directed by Rouvan Silogix and Ali Junejo) were not Napa productions. The five dramas that Napa graduates would be staging are: ‘Lao To Qatl Nama Mera’, ‘Sar Bureeda Khwab’ (adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman), ‘Khel Ek Raat Ka’ (adaptation of a Turkish play), Faraib and Marat/Sade (adaptation of a Peter Weiss play).

Napa’s head of the music department Nafees Ahmed then talked about the music segment of the festival. He said it would be divided into three parts: popular music, fusion of folk-western or classical-western music and afternoon ragas. He said people harboured the notion that not many compositions were made in afternoon ragas. They would be amazed to know that a lot of work had been done in Pakistan in that regard, some of which Napa graduates and faculty would present to music lovers.

Mr Ahmed reiterated that it was the academy’s desire to do children’s programmes on a regular basis as a result of which they had engaged with Toffee TV which specialised in children’s events. Napa faculty member and music composer Arshad Mahmud interjected and informed the media that he would also take part in the children’s shows during the event.