Amidst a large audience the opening ceremony of the drama festival took place on yesterday morning at the Mahila Samity Stage. Acclaimed theatre personality Mamtajuddin Ahmed inaugurated the festival. Jatin Sarkar, president of Udichi, chaired the programme while Probir Sardar, assistant general secretary of Udichi, and Mahmud Selim, general secretary of the group, delivered speeches.

Following the inauguration programme, a seminar titled "Dhaka centered theatre practice in Bangladesh" was presented by Kamaluddin Kabir, an acclaimed set designer in the theatre arena of the country. Professor Niranjan Adhikari chaired he programme after which Professor Momtazuddin Ahmed, Professor Motlub Ali, Dr Biplab Bala, Azad Abul Kalam, Ashish Khondokar, Saidur Rahman Lipon, Hasan Shahriar and others participated in a discussion on the paper.

Kamaluddin Kabir has presented some survey reports on the indigenous art forms and news on the affected artistes at the district level published in different dailies. An interesting part of Kabir's paper contains some documents depicting huge theatre activities at the district level during the 19th century. Theatre activities in such massive scale are not found at present.

Discussants, however, failed to offer proper observations on the paper presented by Kabir. Most of them introduced their own views on various aspects of theatre, apparently irrelevant to the seminar's topic. Since the seminar dealt with the approach of theatre practice in Bangladesh, it was expected that more renowned theatre leaders of the country would be present. However none of the Bangladesh Group Theatre Federation leaders were present at the event.