Masquerade - the performance group is a Chennai based English theatre group. It is one of the few theatre groups in Chennai that survive without financial sponsorship or funding, backed by public faith and smaller donorships.
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'Masquerade - The Performance Group' was founded in June 1994 and debuted with its first performance at Sittrarangam (a little thatched-roof performance structure that existed inside the Island Grounds that overlooks the War Memorial), near Anna Square. Masquerade's first theater performance was an experimental adaptation of Austrian playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Elektra. Later in 2004, 10 years after Masquerade's inception, when the group decided to found Chennai's first youth theater group Landing Stage, Electra [1] was again to be the debut performance. Masquerade has currently completed 17 seasons and close to 70 productions. Even as the group is breathing on the last hours of its 18th season, plans for curating two festivals that are set to become annual feature to the cultural space of Chennai city are afoot - the two festivals being DRAMA-LOG - the first of its kind theatre festival of college theatre groups, in collaboration with Max Mueller Bhavan (Chennai) and MY Theater Festival - featuring a weekend of three youth theater productions.
Masquerade was instrumental in setting up and promoting "Natak" An inter-collegiate theatre festival. The first season of Natak was in 2000, which saw the participants from various city colleges, The following year saw entries from colleges across India. Students were given the platform to design, plan and execute the entire production. Students were provided professional support from the Masquerade team in areas of Light and sound design and execution, as with back stage support and planning. A stipend was paid to the teams to minimize the financial burden on the teams. A standard set of lights and sound equipment, paid for by Masquerade, was made available to the teams in designing their shows.
Performances are social and community-oriented[2]. Masquerade introduced "Three @ Twenty", a community theatre initiative to promote new writers in 2006.[3]
| Year | Title | Author | Language | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Dystopia | adapted from The Twilight Zone | English | |
| 2009 | Charandas Chor (an MYT Production) | Habib Tanvir | English | |
| 2009 | JigSaw | Multiple Authors | English | |
| 2008 | The Truth | Mohan Narayanan | English | |
| 2007 | Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni | Poile Sengupta | English | |
| 2006 | Wood | Gautam Raja | English | |
| Parrots Lies | Andreas Marber | English | ||
| 2005 | A Midsummer Night's Dream | William Shakespeare | English | [4] |