“Our venture is to discover talent that is waiting in the wings. The Foundation will bring together young artistes, musicians, filmmakers, writers and photographers and offer them space in which their creative energies can combine, collide and bounce off each other to create something new something fresh and unexpected,” says Neel Chaudhuri, artistic director, FCTF.

In 2006, the Foundation performed two plays: Positions, an original play written and directed by Neel Chaudhuri, and The Collection, an adaptation of a Harold Pinter play directed by Samar Grewal. Last year, the FCTF started a series of play readings at The Attic near Regal cinema in Connaught Place called ‘Off the Mantle’, beginning with four contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare—Joe Calarco’s R&J, Charles Marowitz’s Julius Ceasar and Richard Nathan’s interpretations of Macbeth and King Lear. “We began 2008 with a reading of Mark Twain’s Diary of Adam and Eve. The readings of Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange and David Hare’s The Blue Room will be later this month,” she says.

Positions 2, a revised version of Positions, and Mouse, are two plays that the Foundation plans to bring to theatre lovers in the coming few months. It also hopes to develop two to three original scripts every year.

The Foundation that started in 2005, welcomes anyone with a passion for theatre but holds extensive auditions before each play to select actors. “For our workshops and school projects, we are looking for enthusiastic volunteers who enjoy working with children and would like to sharpen their communication and theatre skills in a lively environment,” says Kuhu Tanvir, administrative manager, FCTF, which is working towards getting schools in Delhi to use theatre as an alternate teaching method.

“We aim to reach out to a larger number of students. The Foundation is in conversation with many schools to introduce theatre as a module in the curriculum in order to make learning more interesting,” she says. The group has also conducted theatre workshops at colleges in Delhi University and the response, says Tanvir, was overwhelming.

And it’s not just theatre. The Foundation extends its support to other performing arts as well and has supported ten music bands from Delhi put together an album of their original music. “We produced 10,000 copies of the CDs that were distributed to music lovers across the city free of cost. It also included a track by a street children band called Manzil. The idea was to promote something unique and to give these bands a platform to launch themselves at a larger level,” says Tanvir.