Yatrik, Delhi's first bi-lingual theatre group was founded in 1964 by Joy Michael, Roshan Seth, Sushma Seth, Nigam Prakash, Kusum Haidar, Rati Bartholomew, Sneih Das and Marcus Murch. [1] [2] [3] It nurtured the early careers of many actors in theatre, TV and cinema.
Joy Michael, Sushma Seth, Roshan Seth and a few others had been working together with Tom Noonan (the then Cultural-Attache at United States Information Service, Delhi) in a play, 'Abe Lincoln in Illinois'. Noonan's retirement and the group's reluctance to disband led to the idea of 'Yatrik'. The idea emerged on a train ride from Dehradun to Delhi after a performance. Over the summer of 1963-64, individual members of the group contributed their personal resources, and staged plays in Nainital, Mussoorie, Dehradun earning a profit of Rs. 2000/-. With this, Yatrik was formally launched. [4] [5]
The repertory company, registered in 1964 became the city's first professional theatre group. The group conducted weekend performances at Delhi's Mahadev Road. It has since staged over 300 plays in Hindi, and English, performed in India and internationally. [5]
Joy Michael served as its Director for 40 years and produced nearly 250 plays.
Other Directors include:
Sabina Mehta Jaitly, Prakash Bhatia, Sunit Tandon, Avijit Dutt [6]
Yatrik was launched with the performance of the Pulitzer Prize winning "All the King's Men" (by Robert Penn Warren) and was directed by Marcus Murch. [4]
Antigone, (by Jean Anouilh) directed by Kusum Haidar
Harvest , (by Manjula Padmanabhan) directed by Joy Michael [7]
Blood Wedding, directed by Kusum Haidar
Stree directed directed by Joy Michael
The Seagull (by Anton Chekov) directed by Joy Michael
A Delicate Balance directed by Joy Michael
E.Alkazi, Barry John, Kulbhushan Kharbanda , Zohra Sehgal, KK Kohli, Lola Chatterjee, Bhaskar Ghose
Antigone is an Athenian tragedy written by Sophocles in 441 BC and first performed at the Festival of Dionysus of the same year. It is thought to be the second oldest surviving play of Sophocles, preceded by Ajax, which was written around the same period. The play is one of a triad of tragedies known as the three Theban plays, following Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Even though the events in Antigone occur last in the order of events depicted in the plays, Sophocles wrote Antigone first. The story expands on the Theban legend that predates it, and it picks up where Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes ends. The play is named after the main protagonist Antigone.
Red Harvest (1929) is a novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett. The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The plot follows the Op's investigation of several murders amid a labor dispute in a corrupt Montana mining town. Some of the novel was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana.
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Kulbhushan Kharbanda is an Indian actor who works in Hindi and Punjabi films. He is best known for his role as the antagonist Shakaal in Shaan (1980), Starting off with the Delhi-based theatre group 'Yatrik' in the 1960s, he moved to films with Sai Paranjpye's Jadu Ka Shankh in 1974. He worked in several parallel cinema films before working in the mainstream Hindi film industry. He appeared in Mahesh Bhatt's classic Arth (1982), Ek Chadar Maili Si (1986), Waaris (1988), and in all three parts of Deepa Mehta's Elements trilogy: Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005). After nearly two decades he was seen on the theatre stage at the Padatik Theatre in Kolkata in the production of Atmakatha, directed by Vinay Sharma.
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Sushma Seth is an Indian stage, film and television actress. She started her career in the 1950s, and was a founder member of the Delhi-based theatre group Yatrik. Her first film was Junoon in 1978. She is known for playing a mother and grandmother role in movies and on television, and notable for her role as Dadi in the pioneering TV soap Hum Log (1984–1985). She received a nomination for the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Ameena Bai in B. R. Chopra's drama Tawaif (1985). She has worked with famous directors like Dev Raj Ankur, Ram Gopal Bajaj, Manish Joshi Bismil and Chander Shekhar Sharma.
Pablo Bartholomew is an Indian photojournalist and an independent photographer based in New Delhi, India. He is noted for his photography, as an educator running photography workshops, and as manager of MediaWeb, a software company specialising in photo database solutions and server-based digital archiving systems.
Arvind Gaur is an Indian theatre director, actor trainer, social activist, street theatre worker and story teller. He is known for socially and politically relevant plays in India. Gaur's plays are contemporary and thought-provoking, connecting intimate personal spheres of existence to larger social political issues. His work deals with Internet censorship, communalism, caste issues, feudalism, domestic violence, crimes of state, politics of power, violence, injustice, social discrimination, marginalisation, and racism. Arvind is the founder of Asmita, which is a theatre group in Delhi.
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Joy Michael (1927-2018) was an Indian theatre personality and the co-founder of Yatrik, a repertory company based in Delhi. The Government of India honored her in 2012, with the fourth highest civilian award of Padma Shri.
Raj Bisaria was an Indian director, producer, actor and educationalist, described by the Press Trust of India as "the father of the modern theatre in North India". He founded Theatre Arts Workshop in 1966, and Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1975 and the repertory company of Bhartendu Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1980. He blended artistic concepts of the East and the West, and the traditional and the modern.
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