Rising Tides, Reinventing the Roots
South Asian intercultural performance, riverine caravan and ecological theatre symposium. Presented by the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Dhaka, with CIRCUS and Scope360.
Bangladesh Theatre Caravan brings together theatre, culture, heritage, and environmental consciousness across South Asia through performance, research, dialogue, and collective practice. At a critical crossroads, it explores ecological crisis, cultural erosion, and heritage loss while reconnecting with our shared roots to imagine a sustainable, resilient future.
SAARC nations
South Asia, on one stage
Festival days
8 – 12 December 2026
Venues
Capital and district
Productions
20 groups, 40 shows
Folk performers
6 regional caravans
Workshop participants
12 facilitators
Regional canvas
Buses on the road
International conference
3 days, 50+ panelists
Bringing 200+ South Asian artists, theatre practitioners, performers and communities together to exchange artistic practices, perspectives, stories and experiences across borders — through 40 theatre shows across the festival's venues in Bangladesh.
300 folk performers in 6 regional caravans, bringing marginalised performance traditions back into view — reconnecting with South Asia's living cultural traditions, indigenous knowledge and heritage practices to explore how they can be preserved, re-imagined and made relevant today.
Creating dialogue around environmental and social challenges, exploring the relationship between nature, culture, communities and sustainable ways of living through theatre and interdisciplinary inquiry.
Stage productions, a mobile folk caravan, masterclass labs, a daily cultural mela, an international conference, and a closing act on the longest natural beach in the world — running in parallel across the country.
Twenty groups. Eight nations. Forty shows.
The spine of the festival. Twenty selected companies from across South Asia stage forty performances in Dhaka and the district cities, each production travelling from a capital hall to a regional auditorium so the same work meets two very different audiences.
The most original feature of BTC 2026.
A mobile, simultaneous folk performance programme distributed across all six regional clusters. Twelve caravan buses carry three hundred performers into rural grounds, riverine basins, campuses and district centres that a capital-bound festival never reaches.
Three days of practice, six cities at once.
A structured workshop programme running simultaneously across six venues, bringing international facilitation to Bangladeshi theatre practitioners and students. Four hours a day, every day, in acting, directorial poetics, playwriting, scenography, lighting, theatre music and vocal biomechanics.
Two hundred stalls, open from morning to night.
A daily open Cultural Mela runs simultaneously at all eight festival venues, presenting artisans, cottage industries, folk performances and local vendors throughout the festival — handloom and nakshi kantha, terracotta and clay, heritage kitchens, and the makers of khol, ektara, dotara and dhak.
Not a supplement to the festival — part of it.
Conceived not as an academic supplement to the festival but as an integral part of its intellectual and cultural ecology: a landmark platform for South Asian theatre scholarship, covering performance ecology, climate diplomacy, cultural identity and artist mobility policy.
A 120 sq. km natural canvas at Cox's Bazar.
A spectacular Grand Closing Day at Cox's Bazar, where five hundred performers from across South Asia come together for one historic final act along the longest natural sea beach in the world — sunset light, sea acoustics, and un-amplified folk instruments.
Six teams from Bangladesh and two each from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Afghanistan. Every production travels from a Dhaka hall to a district auditorium, while twelve caravan buses take folk performance to the basins in between.
Bangladesh
6 teams
India
2 teams
Pakistan
2 teams
Nepal
2 teams
Bhutan
2 teams
Sri Lanka
2 teams
Maldives
2 teams
Afghanistan
2 teams
6 teams from Bangladesh · 2 each from the other nations
BSA · DU · NSU · BMS Hall · Pan Pacific
Every selected production is staged twice — once in a Dhaka hall, once in a district auditorium — so a work built for the capital also meets the audience that a capital-bound festival never reaches. A first selection of the programme is below; the full slate is announced on 20 October 2026.
Three days of papers, panels and policy dialogue in Dhaka, running alongside five masterclass labs in six cities. Everything presented is peer-reviewed and published.
6
Paper presentations
50+
Panelists
900+
Academic engagements
3
Conference days
Theatre director, scenographer & academic
Indigenous scenography & political dramaturgy
Professor & performance researcher, University of Dhaka
Eastern performance grammar & global theatre
Director & founder, Fame School of Dance & Drama
Regional pedagogy & experimental staging
Theatre music composer & vocal trainer
Theatrical acoustics & indigenous musicology
Playwright, actor & director
Contemporary narrative structures & playwriting
Folk performance director & majma practitioner
Grassroots storytelling & rural majma
Physical theatre specialist & actor
Physicality & spatial dynamics in acting
Dramaturg & performance researcher
Performance ecology & archive preservation
Performance sociologist & associate professor, DU
Climate diplomacy & political activism in art
Playwright, academic & street theatre pioneer
Street movements & regional dialect theatre
Spatial design, light-shadow interplay, and conceptualising classical scripts for modern audiences.
Open-air vocal projection, folk instrument integration, and acoustic design without digital amplification.
Expressive body movement, gesture vocabulary, mime, and non-verbal narrative execution.
Interactive street theatre, community engagement, dialect usage, and improvisational majma.
Translating climate displacement, river erosion and ocean stories into performance.
A daily open Cultural Mela runs simultaneously at all eight festival venues — artisans, cottage industries, folk performances and local vendors, from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM throughout the festival.
Live folk music & performance zones
8 venues · 8 – 12 December 2026 · 10:00 AM – 10:00 PM
80
Traditional craft
Handloom, nakshi kantha, bamboo & jute weaving
50
Indigenous culinary
Heritage South Asian delicacies & pitha
40
Folk pottery & clay
Terracotta art, clay dolls, traditional cookware
30
Folk instruments
Khol, ektara, dotara, flute, dhak & their makers
A spectacular Grand Closing Day at Cox's Bazar, where 500 performers from across South Asia come together for one historic final act — sunset light, sea acoustics, un-amplified folk instruments, and a shoreline procession synchronised along the water line.
0
Performers
0 km
Canvas
0
Grand performance
12 December 2026
The BTC Declaration
On culture, ecology and performing arts heritage — signed at the close of the festival on the Laboni Beach shoreline.
The caravan model puts the festival in front of rural and urban audiences at the same time — half a million people on the ground, and several million more on broadcast, stream and social.
0K+
Live attendees
12 venues · 5 days
2–0M
TV viewers
National audience
0M+
Social impressions
Across platforms
0K+
Streaming
Online & live stream
0+
Countries
Press & media outreach
Institutional & cultural network
Submissions open on 1 September 2026 and the final selection is declared on 20 October, leaving companies seven weeks to prepare for the road.
Submissions open to theatre groups across the eight SAARC nations — scripts, preview recordings and paper abstracts.
Declaration of the selected productions, caravan routes and conference papers.
Festival opens. Main stage productions, regional caravans and the Cultural Mela begin simultaneously.
International Conference in Dhaka alongside three days of masterclass labs running in six cities.
500 performers on the Cox's Bazar shoreline, followed by the BTC Declaration.
Moishan is a faculty member of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Dhaka, internationally recognised for his work as a playwright, director, dramaturge and cultural theorist.
Nationally and internationally acclaimed Bangladeshi film actress
Nationally and internationally acclaimed Bangladeshi theatre, TV and film actor
Actor, Director, Writer & Producer
Nazrul Sangeet Singer
Dancer, Researcher & Cultural Activist
Actor, Director & Playwright
Filmmaker
Specialist, Literary and Cultural Studies
Architect
Sociologist & Theatre Practitioner
Urban Planner & Academician
Photographer
Architect, Filmmaker
Specialist, Arts-Training
Theatre Practitioner
Documentary Filmmaker
Visual Artist, Curator
Playwright, Theatre Practitioner
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Culture, Urbanization and Society
An independent platform advancing research, arts, culture, education and social innovation. We connect ideas, people and communities through interdisciplinary collaboration.
University of Dhaka
The Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, with 30 years of intellectual journey and experience, proudly presents Bangladesh Theatre Caravan 2026 along with CIRCUS.
Operations & execution partner
Scope360 provides operational management, logistics and event execution expertise across every venue, cluster and caravan route.
Association across 8 nations, 12 venues and a global digital footprint — on stage, on the road, in the mela grounds, in the conference journal, and on the Cox's Bazar shoreline.
Headline association across every venue, broadcast and publication.
Category partnerships attached to festival operations.
Long-horizon partners in policy, academia and media.
… and many more
Rising tides, reinventing roots
Partnership decks, category exclusivity and venue branding options are available for the 2026 edition. Open call for productions runs from 1 September 2026.