40 SOCIAL SCIENTIST very old people, taken both from professional and non-professional fields. The typical Nacha actor is usually a peasant, an agricultural labourer, a village artisan or a shop-keeper. He is also a semi-professional actor in the sense that in his spare time he travels about with his band of actors and musicians unfolding his repertoire of small musical comedies in all-night performances for the benefit of a most receptive rural audience all over the region, usually on a commissioned basis, which proves quite lucrative. The more successful parties give an average of 200 performances in a year. These are spread out in a concentrated form between harvest times, during which the actors tend to their vocations on land and in shops. The typical actor is a versatile artist, with a natural gift for singing, dancing, acting and playing instruments, which he polishes to perfection in the course of his experience. He does not have to be taught movement, voice projection, singing or acting. Being illiterate, he is of necessity an improviser of his own dramatic story and characters. Collective functioning in drama comes naturally to him due to the compulsions of his community life. Sometimes an individual evolves the story but more often a play is a collective product in the fullest sense of the word. To this team of about ten semi-professional folk artists a sizeable group of housewives and other rural peoples were added, who had never before appeared on the stage but who had the experience of singing and dancing in the temples, fields and homes as part of the process of worship and daily work. Their inclusion brought two excellent advantages. Firstly, the tradition of men doing women's roles was abandoned to accommodate women on the stage. Secondly, relevant songs, dances, rituals and other artistic expressions of the village community life could be used, normally not used in the Nacha^ thereby making the play even more representative of village life. The inclusion of these also contributed to enrichment of the basic plot and its situations. To this were added authentic folk costumes of the region and essential props suited to the dramatic situations—two elements usually non-existent in the Nacha theatre. A situation was discussed and developed, its characters were evolved and fixed, then roles were distributed to match the characters, and the rest was all improvisation. The dialogues got crystallised through rehearsals, and songs were altered or re-written to suit the situation wherever necessary. The result was an entertaining musical comedy about a rich old man marrying a young girl and in the end losing her to a poor but clever young rogue, her lover. The actors5 electrifying improvisations and witticisms turned it into a social satire of some depth. It was christened with a long and funny title reading like a proverb "Gaon Ke Naon Sas-ural Mor Naon Damad" (The Name of My Home Town is Bridal Chamber, and My Own Name is Mr Bridegroom). The Nacha Workshop of Raipur was a pilot project, sponsored and subsidised by the Central Ministry of Education and Social Welfare as a programme of informal youth education in the arts. In the light of