New Performers Join BLW Ramlila as a 52-Member Cast Rehearses

VARANASI: New performers are rehearsing several major roles in BLW’s Ramlila, with a 52-member cast that includes 14 girls preparing for the production at the Central Sports Ground. The preparations were reported on Sunday, September 13.

The roles of Ram, Lakshman, Shatrughan, Kevat, Angad and Jatayu will be played by new entrants this time. Under director S. D. Singh, training is concentrating on expression, posture and timing as well as understanding the characters.

A distinctive feature of the BLW presentation is that the actors do not deliver their own dialogue. Narration and recitation carry the spoken story, while those on stage convey it through movement and expression. Music and acting therefore have to meet at the right moment.

The preparation account also identifies folk musical elements among the planned components. It does not provide the complete performance timetable, admission arrangements or the names of the new actors assigned to each role.

When gesture carries the scene

This form of presentation gives a small movement considerable work to do. An actor has to make an intention understandable while remaining in step with a voice heard elsewhere on the stage. Knowing what comes next in the narration is part of knowing when to move.

For an audience, that can create a different way of watching a familiar story. Attention falls on the relationship between the recited passage and the response of the characters, rather than on whether an actor speaks a line loudly enough.

These observations explain the performance method described in the preparations; they are not an eyewitness review of a rehearsal or a claim about scenes already staged this year.

Part of a wider living tradition

UNESCO describes Ramlila as a performance tradition combining episodes of the Ramayana with narration, song, recitation and dialogue. The tradition was inscribed on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, after its original proclamation in 2005.

Its account identifies Benares and Ramnagar among important centres and notes the work contributed beyond acting, including costumes, masks, lighting and other preparations. That wider recognition concerns the tradition, not a separate UNESCO designation for this year’s BLW production.

The arrival of new performers is the immediate local development. Rehearsal allows the next cast to learn how a production is put together, including the coordination that remains largely invisible once a scene begins.

For people planning to attend, the next useful update will be the organisers’ confirmed dates and timings. The present report records preparations in progress, not the opening of the public performance or a completed Dussehra celebration.