The civil services prelims and bank recruitment exams has posed this question. It has popped up as an entry in current affairs website GK Today as well.
"India’s first-ever micro drama festival 'Thespis' has started in which city?
[A] Udaipur
[B] New Delhi
[C] Pune
[D] Agra"
The right answer happens to be New Delhi and on April 21, theatre group 'Vriksh the theatre' will return with Thespis 3—the third edition of the national micro drama festival. Only this time, more than 40 ten-minute plays, encompassing 500 artists, will compete for top honours, from 10am to 10pm. The organisers at Vriksh, which was started in 2015 at Kerala Club, say it is the first time in the history of world theatre that 40 back-to-back plays are scheduled on a single day with a maximum duration of ten minutes.
Cash prizes will be offered for 10 categories, including best production, script, direction, actor, actress, technician, etc., with Rs 50,000 for best play, the highest amount. Vriksh does not receive corporate sponsorship but is entirely self-funded by the members of the collective. The festival is organised in the name of Greek artist 'Thespis', who is believed to be the person first to appear on stage.
The inaugural drama in the non-competitive category for this edition is called 'Kanpur-e-Kashmir', directed by Vijay Kapoor who was the winner of last year's festival. This will be followed by a series of plays in different languages, including English, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Urdu. More than seventy entries had poured in from across the country, out of which 39 have been shortlisted for the competition on 21 April. The theatre collective aims to make the festival more international in scale next year with participation from overseas troupes.
This year’s motto for the group is ‘Art for Humanity’, themed for the ‘rehabilitation of flood-affected population and the uplift of street children’.
