THE AUDITION WEEKEND !!!

Hello everyone!

So this weekend (8th and 9th September), since there are no memos, no speaking rounds and no submissions, we thought it would be really nice to have some fun :)

Cultural Committee is utilizing this sweet time gap to present to you, the greatest, the most awesome, the most ridiculously exciting weekend of all time. All the three auditions, in one weekend! Yes, you read it right, ALL THREE OF THEM in one weekend! Most of you must be thinking, why this much awesomeness in one weekend, for them we have just one answer, because we can! So get ready to sing, dance and paint.

8th September, Saturday, 2:00 pm (deadline for submission)- Fine Arts Audition

8th September, Saturday, 6:00 pm- Vocals Audition

9th September, Sunday, 6:00 pm- Dance Audition

The rules for each audition are as follows:

Eastern Vocal Rules:

Participants per team: Solo + 1 accompanist (Optional) (Use of karaoke is prohibited, but you can use a recording of a single instrument)

Time duration: min: 2 minutes; max: 6 minutes

Judging criteria:

• Voice quality, clarity, vocal range, song selection and the overall impact of the song.
• Both Classical song and light eastern non-classical song tracks of any language allowed to be sung. Folk allowed.
• No instruments would be provided and have to be arranged on your own.
• In case of any technical fault, timers shall be reset and the participant will be allowed to perform from the beginning.
• The decision of the judges and organizers will be Final and binding.

Western Vocal Rules:

Participants per team: Solo + 1 accompanist (Optional) (Use of karaoke is prohibited, but you can use a recording of a single instrument)

Time duration: min: 2 minutes; max: 6 minutes

Judging criteria: the same rules as Eastern except that song should be western.

Dance Audition Rules:

1. Participants can either give a solo performance or perform in a group. In case of a group performance, participants will be marked individually.

2. The minimum duration of performance - 2 minutes and maximum - 4 minutes. There will be penalty for overshooting the time limit.

3. Performance can be of western or ethnic genres, or even fusion of both.

4. Judging criteria include choreography, stage presence and costume.

5. Bring your own music on pen drive.

6.Participants can audition for both the eastern and western team, but will have to prepare two separate performances for the same.

Fine Arts Audition:

The theme for the audition is "NUJS". You can sketch, draw, make cartoons, posters or express the theme in any creative way possible.

So unleash the creative genius in you!! Even if you are not participating, come there and support your friends and enjoy the performances!

Hope to see you all there :)

Theatre Auditions 2012-13 !!

The day I walked into NUJS, I had various first impressions of the students - brainy, some brawny, beautiful and witty. But never did I think they'd be dramatic. Well, when you think 'law school', you don't really think 'theatrics', do you?

But on 30th July, this bunch of theatre enthusiasts surprised me, and the audience too.

The first round, the monologue, started off with Anish from the third year, doing a literally wicked rendition of the devil, entertaining and amusing. Mansi from the second year did a touching scene from the movie, Dor, spell-binding and mesmerizing the audience. Next, we had Meenakshi, who portrayed an amusing role of a gorgeous woman, who had men fighting for her attention. Then the audience enjoyed disarmingly witty, satirical self-penned monologues and impromptu's delivered by Anirudh Vohra and Joachim Saldanha, and a rather crazy, toe-curling performance by Swaroop, who acted as a drug addict, writhing on stage and screaming, leaving us all quite spooked, quite impressed. There was a hilarious satirical monologue about how wives constantly, inexplicably "collect things", by Srishti Goyal, who was very much in character with her bushy moustache, as the distressed husband of a wife with an OCD for collections. From the first years, Archit Krishna did a scene from a play which depicts the anger of the common man against corruption, and he performed it with such expertise, such rawness, that the audience shivered at his every word. Then up came Akshaya, portraying a hilarious British actress rehearsing for a role in a play by Shaw, making the students laugh and roar in applause. We had Jessamine do Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking scene from the Shakespearean play, spine-chilling and brilliant. Shakespeare was a popular choice this year, with various renditions of Caesar, Caesar, and, um.. Caesar. Hang on, Aishwaria Iyer did a dialogue from Merchant of Venice, with amazing vocal transitions. We had enactments from movies like Any Given Sunday and Singing in the Rain. Finally, Surbhi Dhar played a serial killer, with a love for 6-foot tall men in suits, and Inderjeet Sircar (Pipo), doing a stand-up comedy, bringing a rib-cracking funny end to the first round.

Due to the long list of enthusiastic participants (there were twenty-four, might I add) the second round only started at around ten. The second round was the group round, where the participants were given certain topics, and had to perform a skit in about fifteen minutes, with ten minutes prep time and about three minutes of performance. Since we were short of time, every group had to hurriedly perform their skit, resulting in hilarious errors and omissions, and strange unrehearsed dialogues. It was a hilarious ordeal, with one group acting out auditions, another as Project Majnu, the moral police, and another as our very own NUJS, with a visitor as our very own - Mamta Bannerjee. Hysterical, would be the right word to describe this round.

Well, for all you awesome aspiring actors and actresses out there, those who were there with us for the auditions, thank you so much for giving us an opportunity to witness your brilliance, and the ones who missed out, make sure you try out for the team next year !!

And the NUJS University Theatre Team 2012-13 is:

POOL A

Aishwaria Iyer
Akshaya Venkataraman
Anirudh Vohra
Archit Krishna
Arindrajeet Basu
Devhuti Shaw
Joachim Saldhana
Mansi Jhaveri
Srishti Goyal
Tapobrata

POOL B

Issac John
Meenakshi Kurpad
Paavni Anand
Satchit Bhogle
Surabhi Dhar

Shruti Nanivadekar......

"God" - Comedy, Confusion and Drama

24 July, 2012 - the day God came to NUJS... 

“Every good play has to have a good beginning, a middle and an end.” (– Hepatitis, in God by Woody Allen)… Or does it?

Delightfully confusing and refreshingly comic, the play "God", a Barnstormers Production, opened to a full house on Tuesday evening with the stage set up as the entrance of Sardi's, Broadway and 45th street, the New York theatre hub.

Curtains were raised and the audience, that had been waiting with bated breath, broke into applause as two of our leads, Greeks, Hepatitis (Aniket Ghosh) and Diabetes (Joachim Saldanha) walked onto the stage engaged in a very intense conversation about the ending of the play Hepatitis was scripting for a drama festival.  An ending that neither of the two seem to concur upon. This debate goes on until Diabetes points how both of them were fictional and were characters in a play. And this leads to an extremely amusing situation where Hepatitis decides to address the audience of the play in which he was a fictional character (we did mention it’s delightfully confusing). And therein entered Doris Levine (Modhulika Bose), a major in philosophy, who, not quite content with just watching the play, came up to answer Hepatitis’s questions on life , freedom and chaos. The exchange of philosophies continues until they realize they need to get back to the ending of the play (or the lack thereof). Eventually Trichinosis (Utkarsh Srivastava), another Greek who’d heard of their dilemma, brought with him an ending that was supposedly bound to amaze the audience. 

Armed with their finale, they present their play with Diabetes playing Phidipedes, a slave who needs to deliver a message to a king. The ending of course doesn't go quite the way it was planned. The crowd was in splits throughout and there was not one dull moment. With characters that ran across the stage 

With some brilliant performances by the actors, costumes that were a huge hit and Music that won the audience over, the play kept everyone enthralled till the very last minute. The cast and crew did an incredible job of putting it all together. None of this would have been possible if not for the Director Modhulika and her zeal and passion.

Akshaya Venkataraman....

Theatre Auditions 2011-12 !!

16 September, 2011

All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. I could not have used a more clichéd line to start my account on the theatre auditions but we in the Cultural Committee are a strong believer in mediocrity and I personally lack all the panache of even a mediocre writer. So as I dwell in the intricate corners of my mind to remember that fateful day when we organised the theatre auditions, it but makes me laugh to think that all the mediocrity was washed down by some awesome, kickass performances. Considering we are law students, we generally have enough spare time to pursue our varied passions. Theatre enthusiasts are an integral part of NUJS, the drunken parties, the tales of debauchery, the opinionated debates, the illogical moots, each and every one of them requires a thorough and strong knowledge of basic dramatics and this was very nicely illustrated at the auditions.

I was offered the prestigious honour of hosting the audition (read *threatened to do it*) which I enthusiastically accepted (read *had no other choice*). I must confess, the audience turnout was not expected to be that huge. But this was not going to stop our young little theatre soldiers. The whole exercise was divided into two rounds, the first consisted of a monologue which the contestants had to prepare beforehand and the second round was an impromptu one in which the contestants were divided into teams and given weird scenarios to act out. The  audition  began  with  an  ever  pleasant  rendition  of  a Shakespearean work by a first year. It was either Romeo and Juliet, Julius Ceaser or Hamlet (The only Shakespeare plays I know... and now that I come to think of it could have been Macbeth). From my immense literary knowledge on Shakespeare's work, I could definitely say that the performance easily captured the essence of the whole scene. But our contestants were not going to restrict themselves to the conventional style of auditioning. They went ahead and performed monologues from many classic films which have a cult following. Films like American Psycho, Inglorious Basterds, Braveheart. Yours truly also tried his luck with the auditions. I tried to do an Alan Shore but ultimately forgot my lines and was shown off the stage with a few sympathetic claps.

One very special feature of the audition was the different array of accents that was on display. We had Aniket Ghosh of the second year doing a wee bit of Scottish accent and playing Braveheart, we had Joachim Saldhana pulling off an impeccable English accent and reciting Lord Mountbatten's speech, and we had Utkarsh Meena of first year with an outstanding Gujarati accent, playing Brad Pitt from Inglorious Basterds. Shashvat Arya of the second year acted out the opening scene of Gulaal and had most of the audience convinced that a separate Rajputana sovereignty is the best thing the country needs right now. Mohit Prasad did a fun little one sided conversation of a boyfriend who longed for a break-up. And our very own Rituraj did an Amitabh impression (which was creepily very accurate). The weirdness reached its pinnacle when Vineet Bhalla opted to act out the classic scene from American Psycho in which Christian Bale kills his first victim; not only Bhalla but also the victim (Shashvat) did a fabulous job.

The teams for the second round were eventually divided and they were given fifteen minutes to prepare a short play on situations given to them. During the fifteen minutes a short film directed by the judge was shown to the audience. The impromptu round was a huge success, showing that the students in our college have an awesome sense of humour, the most memorable amongst them was of Aniket, Prateek and Mohit about *ahem* girls in boy's hostel *ahem* (we would like to state that all views expressed by the contestants were their alone and the Cult Com does not endorse or support any of them) which was freakishly funny. After the audition, the judges invited all the contestants in a classic theatre circle and gave them the feedback. Everyone returned a better actor that day.

Divyanshu.......

University Dance Team Auditions 2011-12 !!

Even before I had joined NUJS, one of the events that I really, really looked forward to was the university dance team audition, because for people who are in love with dance, being there on stage at every opportunity, is all that matters. So that is what I am going to talk about.

Well, I had known I would perform at the audition, but what I had not known was that I would be a part of the Cultural Committee (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cultural-Committee-NUJS/154440831233788?ref=ts) itself and hence, not only was I going to participate in the audition, but I was also going to help organise it! The meetings were held, rules were framed, the date set (making sure it was nowhere near the contracts tutorial !!), the auditorium requisitioned and the notices put up. Then there were things like arranging for the judge, deciding on the “guest performances”, deciding on the duties like registration, judgement, etc. The posters for the audition also had to be made. And finally, the ‘noojies’ had to be coaxed into coming for the audition because for some incomprehensible reason, we just don’t do a thing until we really have no other choice left....

There were three days to go for the audition, everything was set, people were practicing and I still had no clue about my performance. On the day of the audition, after frantic last minute music editing and practicing, I settled down in the auditorium with my friends. I was up at number 7. The programme started with the welcoming of the judges and the reading of rules by the emcee for the evening – Divyanshu. Considering the applause and the comments (“oh, he is so cute”, “he’s adorable” and the like) from the audience, I have no doubts about the popularity of the emcee ;) (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1107352875 – his facebook profile, just for you ;) The auditions were held for both eastern and western categories, with Stephen as the external judge for the event (He is a Dance Instructor/Choreographer at Crewk'd: https://www.facebook.com/crewkd) 

The evening ended with a rocking performance on “Aaja Nachle” by Khushi Kejriwal followed by a duet performance by Gayathri and Modhulika on “Bedardi Raja”, which was undoubtedly superb and left everyone wanting for more. We even made the judge dance for us on stage.

But the best performance of the evening by a huge margin was definitely Divyanshu grooving to “Chamak Challo” ;) :P

The results were announced after a few days.

And the team is :

Eastern Team:

Sushruti Tripathi, Apoorva Sundar, Anushka Shetty, Alphonsa Jojan and Neeti Bhatt.

Western Team:

Nivedita Udupa, Ambika Wadehra, Sadhvi Sood, Avichal Mathur and Utkarsh Meena.

.............................    Sushruti  Tripathi  :)

Black Comedy- Theatre at its best

Black Comedy- NUJS' first theatre production opened to a bout of silent anticipation in the auditorium on the eve of Holi. The darkness on the stage was in tune with the bated breath of the audience. And as just everyone was expecting lights to be turned on, voices were heard in the dark...

Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer, follows a reversed lighting scheme. It is a farce set in a London flat during an electrical blackout. To read the play, click here

It was a difficult task to handle the lights in this particular theatre production. Murali rose to the task and performed it admirably. Vishnu Shriram managed to win over the audience with his sound effects. The set designed by Peter Adam and Vijay was nothing short of miraculously marvellous. Costumes arranged for by Ketaki Purohit suited the play perfectly and the ease and dexterity with which Nitika Gupta designed and arranged for the props was amazing. Modhulika Bose did a fantastic job as the asistant director. Being the convenor of the cultural committee, Naman Gupta was thought of to be the right person to be the production manager and he proved the same right. And the play would not have been possible if not for Amoolya Narayan, the director and the most enthusiastic person on the sets. The cast and crew worked tirelessly for perfection, helped by several others including commiittee members. The play could not have been pulled off but for everyone's cooperation and support.


The play opened with Brindsle (played by Divyanshu) and his fiancée Carol (played by Srishti Goyal) who have taken the fancy furniture of neighbour Harold’s ((played by Jochaim Saldana)flat in order to impress Carol's father, Colonel Melkett (played by Tapobrata Mukherjee). Brindsley is afraid that the Colonel will not give up his daughter to a starving artist. Things go awry when the lights go out, leaving Brindlsey helpless as characters arrive, one by one. First is Brindsley's elderly neighbor, Miss Furnival (played by Vaishnavi), followed by Colonel Melkett, unimpressed by the blackout, and Brindsley's worst nightmare comes true as Harold returns early. Brindsley tries desperately to return the furniture without Harold noticing while dealing with the rest of the guests (which includes the electrician/philosopher Schuppanzigh (played by Vineet Bhalla)and the millionaire George Bamberger (played by Devang Agarwala). The play ended with a standing ovation by the audience who were enthralled by the magical experience they had just had.

Here is a short clip from the play:

4th NUJS Night

NUJS Night- the mesmerising event that brings the entire NUJS family together- became 4 years old. Pragya Gupta tells us about the birthday celebrations:

The year’s most awaited event, by faculty and students alike, was organised by the mess committee and the cultural committee on the crisp night of the 30th of January. Twinkling lights around the campus and the cheesy bollywood music blaring through the speakers promised a very entertaining evening ahead.

After the arrival of the VC and the ceremonial lighting of the lamp, the tiny stage set up near the cess pool was taken over by the hosts for the night, Abhisar Bairagi and Kumar Ashutosh. No person who dared to come up on the stage was spared their witty assault! The audience had a fun time at the expense of the hapless interviewees (a celebrated frenemy duo, and Lord convenor himself!) who were busy dodging extremely uncomfortable questions and while the rest of us read between their very diplomatic lines. Meanwhile, there were people at work backstage who were punctuating the proceedings with some very well chosen songs (recall; ‘yeh doosti...’ and ‘main jooru ka ghulaam.....’ to be read w.r.t. the last bracket).

Next to come up on the stage were band ‘Jo so ho so’ (nomenclated right behind the stage) whose rendition of “Afterglow“held the audience enthralled. This was followed by Vineet Bhalla’s performance, who had prepared a mime on ‘Don’t look back in anger’. The next performance much to the audience’s delight was by The Indian Music Act, with Siddharth Tiwari as the lead singer. Their very popular ‘Hostel ke ye faasle’ elicited a very enthusiastic response from the audience! On popular demand, the lyricist, a very hesitant Mr Akshat Vajpayee, was called up on the stage and applauded.

Here the proceedings came to a halt for a very much needed dinner break. More than the delicious spread, I think the rarity of eating and not having to wash the plate afterwards was exciting for the hostelers. The members of the messcom and the purple-liveried waiters had their hands full with the mile long queue for the food. Needless to say, the faculty enjoyed the dinner as much as the students did.

The audience’s attention was snagged back onstage by Gayathri R. and Alphonsa whose very lively dance on ‘Randaka Randaka’ quickly made people run to fill the seats up again. This was followed by Rituraj Sharma’s much awaited performance, who took the audience through the golden ages of Bollywood with the help of Saniya, Antara Priya, Avichal and Pranav; the last three being his ‘hand-picked' first year talents.
Next came the biggest highlight of the evening, the performance which the faculty had also been eagerly looking forward to.... the very original skit by some very talented actors. The scene opened to a faculty meet between the Vice Chancellor (Kislay, the best of all by unanimous opinion), and the rest of the faculty members. The people almost fell off their chairs laughing and trying to eat and clap and hoot at the same time!


Not to be let off easily, the teachers were called up on the stage next. Prof. M.P. Singh had the entire cast of the play interviewing him; then, with great expectations of some interesting revelations, the wardens of the hostels were interviewed, though with the peril of exams hanging over their heads, the interviewers couldn’t quite press upon some of the more salacious topics. The next talk was quite a novelty with Prof. Daniel Matthews interviewing professor Shameek Sen.

The last performance of the evening was a very innovatively composed instrumental by ‘Peter and Pals’,and it set just the right tone for wrapping up the night’s activities. Thus ended the highly energised and entertaining NUJS night for the year 2011, with hopes of a similar gathering year after year.