About The Event
ACT Season 16
(February 22-28, 2026)
Various Venues in Delhi/NCR
The 16th edition of ACT – Atelier Campus Theatre Festival marks not just another year of performances but a reaffirmation of what theatre truly stands for: community, collaboration, and collective expression. ACT embraces the spirit of celebration—a celebration of voices, dissent, identities, stories, and the transformative power of coming together.
Atelier’s ACT Festival aka "Atelier’s Campus Theatre" Festival is the World’s Largest Campus Theatre fiesta. Started in 2007, this festival has witnessed more than 800 performances in the last 15 seasons.
In Season 16, we aim to achieve a bigger, better and diverse this year, from February 22-28, 2026.
Festival Curator
Kuljeet Singh
Festival Director
Mansi Grover
Festival Manager
Manjot Singh
Festival Advisor
Gaurav Suri
Name of the group: Ibtida
Name of the college : Hindu College
Synopsis of the play:
“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” -Gautama Buddha
What happens when the truth has waited longer than memory?
In the ancient city of Banaras, where rituals promise purification and silence is mistaken for
peace, Zuhur unfolds inside a family that has learned to survive by not looking back. Years ago, a
truth was quietly removed, buried beneath propriety, prayer, and the careful management of
memory.
In the present, Shaurya, a young man living within this inherited calm, begins to feel an unnamed
void, an absence that does not wound loudly, but unsettles deeply. As the house prepares itself
through rituals meant to secure harmony, fragments of the past begin to surface through objects,
spaces, and a presence that refuses explanation.
As past and present collapse, Shaurya discovers that silence is not the absence of violence, but its
most enduring form. What his family once concealed in order to survive begins to emerge not
dramatically, but inevitably. And with emergence comes a reckoning that offers no resolution,
only clarity.
Zuhur is not a story of vengeance or resolution.It is a meditation on truth that surfaces without
permission, on lives altered by inherited silence, and on the cost of witnessing what was never
meant to be acknowledged.
In the end, the question remains:
is encounter enough, or does it demand departure?
