During our short meeting, Sneha Kumari—coordinator for the Department of Theatre—explained to me the working of their department during the fest.

The department organizes seven events across four genres — fashion, music, dance and drama. For fashion, it organizes FashP, the signature fashion show for Oasis. Drama incorporates competitions in two categories — Street Play and Stage Play. Owing to the large duration of the segment, Stage Play is done in two legs. They are also organising a professional play by a theatre troupe. On the dance front, the department organizes two events, Choreo and Street Dance.

The major work for DoT before the fest involves scouting for judges. The focus of this task is to make sure that they’re from outside the Delhi University circuit—the major source of external footfall for the fest—so that there is no bias. This is an even bigger concern, given that there was an issue concerning the same, last Oasis. The screening work starts months in advance, with members doing intensive background checks on all prospective judges.

The preliminary work for the event begins in the middle of the semester, as DoT works on shortlisting participants for the final round of each competition. They tend to receive a large number of entries, which makes the work long and requiring exhaustiveness. This is especially true for drama, where they filter out participants by watching videos and reading full scripts. Once this selection is done, they pass on the list of selected participants to the Department of Publication and Correspondence, who then handle further correspondence with them.

There have been no major changes this year in the functioning of the department this year, besides the exclusion of joint-coordinators – the department will have event coordinators, specific to a particular event. Even though the work is intense, coordinator Sneha says that her time working for the department has been fun and has taught her to think on her feet.