Guwahati, December 14, 2023: As Badungduppa Kalakendra at Rampur in Goalpara district of Assam steps into the silver jubilee year of existence next year, the organization is welcoming theatre, art and culture lovers for the 14th edition of the ‘Under the Sal Tree’ theatre festival.
The unique festival, acclaimed internationally for its ecofriendly setup amid Sal tree plantation, will be held on December 15, 16 and 17. The festival is organized completely under natural settings – with no artificial devices, not even a microphone to enhance the voice of the actors. The organizers use only bamboo and straw to build the stage and the sitting arrangements for the spectators.
As the festival, started by Late Sukracharjya Rabha, one of the widely respected theatre personalities of the region, hosts the 14th edition, the Badungduppa Kalakendra looks forward to the Silver Jubilee year 2024 – celebrating the arduous journey of relentless experimentation with theatre as art form since day one.
Spearheading the avant-garde movement of “Hygiene Theatre” since its inception, Late Sukracharjya Rabha organised the theatre festival in the midst of nature to spread the message of the importance of co-existing with nature establishing a symbiotic relationship. Started in 2008, the festival seeks to experiment and inaugurate a new idiom of performance with special focus on redefining the reality through self-realization by inversion of the colonial ‘self/other’ binary avoiding the tradition of imitating the ‘other’. Late Rabha and his theatre group Badungduppa Kalakendra earned international acknowledgement for the open-air theatre festival, ‘Under the Sal Tree’.
Sukracharjya Rabha passed away in 2018.
This year, the festival is supported by Rabha Hasong Autonomous Council, Indian Oil Corporation Limited and Bongaigaon Refinery.
