Rangbhumi : A happy playground

Senior leadership from organisations across India-

Participatory theatre methods integrated with Transactional Analysis to examine the dynamics of communication, authority, and power in professional environments

The workshop combined Forum Theatre—developed by Augusto Boal—with Sociometry, allowing participants to collectively stage and interrogate real workplace scenarios involving negotiation and conflict. Through embodied enactments, leaders were able to observe how communication patterns emerge from different ego states.

Rather than discussing conflict only at a cognitive or managerial level, the theatrical interventions created a performative space where participants could witness how hierarchical structures are enacted through everyday interactions

The integration of Forum Theatre and sociometry enabled a collective investigation of power and response, moving beyond theoretical discussion to embodied experimentation. Leaders could test alternative ways of negotiating conflict, reflecting on how their internal ego states, shaped by personal history, organizational culture, and social norms, manifest in professional interactions.

Through this process, the workshop positioned participatory theatre as a reflective laboratory for leadership practice, where communication patterns and hierarchical dynamics could be temporarily disrupted, examined, and re-imagined.

At Liberal Edge Week-
This week long intensive participatory theatre workshop explored how memory, power, and lived experience move through the body, beyond written or official archives. Facilitative dramaturgy was at the centre, activating the embodied repertoire, centering ritual, movement, storytelling, and performance.

Playback Theatre opened space for stories rarely spoken in everyday life,experiences of silence, powerlessness, and speaking up, making visible how few spaces exist to hold difference. Through Image Theatre and Forum Theatre, inspired by Augusto Boal, participants explored how systems shape individual lives, and why collective speaking can feel difficult even when injustice is recognised.

The work moved into the streets of Ukkadam, engaging with a site layered with everyday labour, memory, and histories of violence. Through walking, slow conversations, and embodied listening, participants carried stories in their bodies rather than extracting them as data. Mapping and public sharing extended the work beyond the studio, inviting dialogue and reflection.

The workshop became a space to witness, reflect, and rehearse individual and collective agency.

This participatory public performance, presented at Uitnacht Festival in Arnhem, operates at the intersection of feminist urbanism, participatory art, and debates on gendered safety in public space. The work invited passers-by to sit and engage in conversations on safety, across all genders, cultural backgrounds, and nationalities. Through these situated encounters, the performance foregrounded how safety is experienced unevenly across bodies, identities, and urban contexts.

Grounded in practice-as-research, the performance mobilised the body as a method for producing knowledge about the city. Drawing on feminist urbanist critiques that expose how urban design, policy, and governance often privilege normative, male, and able-bodied subjectivities, the work created a temporary counter-public where lived experience became a form of urban expertise. Rather than treating safety as an abstract metric, the performance reframed it as an embodied, affective, and relational condition.

Participants reflected on the presence, or absence,of participatory safety policies in their cities, such as citizen consultations, safety audits, or reporting mechanisms that translate everyday experiences into planning and governance processes. These conversations revealed how participatory infrastructures can either enable or foreclose civic agency, particularly for women and gender-marginalised communities.

The blindfold functioned as a critical performative device, intensifying listening while symbolising both vulnerability and resistance. It articulated a personal and political desire,my aspiration, as a woman from India, to move through public space without constant hyper vigilance. As a participatory artwork, the performance did not seek resolution or policy prescription; instead, it activated a shared space of listening, attention, and co-presence, reconfiguring how safety, care, and the right to the city might be collectively imagined.

Photos by -
Performace invigilation and production -
Logistics support -
Venue support-
Huge thanks team! And

A series of Seminars on Playback Theatre in Communities – as an Artistic Mediation Tool, University of Ottersberg
Seminar 3-


In this practice, embodied cartography serves as a method for generating repertoire by spatialising affect and translating emotional experience into bodily gestures. These gestures, emerging from mapped feelings, form an embodied vocabulary that can be shared and reactivated. Playback theatre then circulates this material across bodies through re-performance, enabling individual experiences to become shared and repeatable. Through this process, gestures and narratives remain flexible rather than fixed, producing a mobilised repertoire—an ensemble of embodied, performable actions and stories that can be rehearsed, adapted, and continuously activated within participatory practice. This approach positions both mapping and performance as tools for exploring, mediating, and creatively engaging with community experiences.

Thank you for the invitation.

At a manufacturing plant in rural Maharashtra, we facilitated a participatory theatre process with shop-floor workers, machine operators, and logistics staff, men and women working within a predominantly male-dominated industrial environment.

Using Forum Theatre and participatory dialogue, we explored gender inclusion not as policy, but as everyday practice: how care is negotiated through space, communication, timing, and access to leadership. These dynamics were visible from the outset,
men and women instinctively seated themselves apart, reproducing familiar gendered separations even before the performance began.

As the process unfolded, women spoke openly about discomfort and risk: sitting beside male colleagues, sharing factory transport, attending late-night or informal meetings. Men, in turn, began recognising how culture shapes proximity, behaviour, and power. Inclusion emerged as something lived through bodies and space, not intention alone.

One moment shifted the room. A young male worker invoked Maharashtrian history, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the 17th-century founder of the Maratha Empire known for ethical leadership; his mother Jijabai, remembered for instilling values of courage and respect for women; and Savitribai Phule, a 19th-century social reformer who opened one of the first schools for girls in India. Gender inclusion was reframed not as a “new” idea, but as part of a local ethical lineage. His intervention functioned as allyship from within the most structurally privileged group in the room.

The process did not resolve disagreement. Some men continued to argue that leadership should prioritise male breadwinners. Rather than smoothing this over, Forum Theatre held the tension open. Listening became political labour.

This encounter exemplified mobilised repertoire: embodied histories, cultural memory, and lived experience activated in real time. Women were clear, if institutions and men create safer structures, inclusion will follow. Until then, dialogue remains unfinished.

ParticipatoryPerformance

student summit
Applied Theatre for Empathy and Creativity

We worked with de-mechanisation of bodies (Boal’s exercises), mirroring, sociometry, and Image Theatre, inviting encounters beyond words through movement, proximity, and choice.

A striking moment emerged when a male participant stepped into a female participant’s heels, not to claim her experience, but to briefly test the material and social conditions that shape gendered movement. This gesture framed empathy not as emotional identification, but as situated attentiveness, partial, negotiated, and ethically bounded. In the Indian context, where masculinity is often tightly policed, the act gently disrupted normative gender alignments.

Working in unfamiliar groups, participants engaged with Image Theatre and tableau-making to explore stress, blocks, challenges, and moments of impasse, using the body as a site of inquiry and transformation.
Through sociometry, the inquiry expanded into how students experience learning and education. Participants spoke about reconfiguring timetables, shifting classroom relationships through more collaborative or flipped models, questioning uniforms, and imagining alternatives to the examination system.

The applied theatre space became a liminal zone where institutional hierarchies temporarily softened. Here, agency was not granted but performed, as students enacted themselves as thinking subjects capable of reimagining empathy, education, and social norms.

Such a meaningful and purposeful gathering -

Mumbai

I recently facilitated an artistic research workshop with 14 women government officers from Assam, Gujarat, Bihar, Haryana, and Maharashtra. Using Image Theatre, simultaneous dramaturgy, and Playback Theatre, we explored how repertoire, as articulated by Diana Taylor, functions as a method and medium for examining power in gendered administrative environments.

Through embodied exercises such as the “Power Handshake,” participants enacted scenarios of power over, power with, and power within. These embodied interventions surfaced tacit knowledge about navigating political hierarchies and male-dominated institutional spaces, knowledge that rarely appears in bureaucratic documentation.

The Playback Theatre segment further transformed individual experiences into a shared performative archive. Stories of political intimidation, corruption networks, and high-risk decision-making became sites of collective reflection, generating new insights into the emotional and structural realities of women’s leadership in governance.

These stories revealed not only the scale of risks these women navigate but also the emotional labour they carry, the constant negotiation between internal fear and outward composure, between vulnerability and responsibility. Their narratives revealed the quiet courage required to hold authority in environments where gendered scrutiny and institutional pressures intersect.

The session became a space to witness bravery, acknowledge structural challenges, and honour the strength of these women officers. Through embodied work, Image Theatre, and storytelling, they collectively explored how power can be recognised, challenged, transformed, and reclaimed.

The workshop demonstrated how repertoire operates as an epistemological framework, producing emergent, situated knowledge that circulates through gesture, relationality, and collective inquiry. Artistic research here becomes a powerful tool for understanding and transforming the lived conditions of bureaucratic labour.

As we go deeper into the histories of the Denotified Tribes, the questions sharpen:
Who gets to write history? Who gets to speak for a community?
Whose memory is preserved, and whose is wiped clean?
Drawing on André Lepecki’s choreopolitics- we ask: Who is allowed to move freely? Who is stopped? Who occupies public space, and who is pushed out?
A place is never empty, it carries incidents, resistances, silences, and stories. And through these stories, the politics of space and movement becomes visible.

Playback Theatre for Social Justice
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The Playback Theatre Intensive and Democratic Dialoguing program provides a dedicated space for members of denotified tribes in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh ( India)—communities that continue to be denied fundamental rights and access to basic services. Despite decades since their formal “denotification,” many families still live under the stigma of being labelled as thieves or threats, and their children face limited educational and occupational opportunities.

The program began with open conversations and story-sharing, where participants reflected on the ways society reads their bodies, through appearance, clothing, and language, and how these markers often lead to exclusion from shops, neighbourhoods, and routine public spaces.

Guided by the vision of establishing the first Playback Theatre group of denotified tribes in India, the participatory workshop seeks to nurture performers who will return to their villages to form additional groups and build interlinked networks of practice. By performing their narratives to broader audiences, participants increase their visibility, challenge dominant perceptions, and assert their right to dignity, equality, and social belonging.

Supported by Healing on the Move, in collaboration with Rangbhumi Applied Theatre. In association with Budhan Theatre
Bhasha Research And Publication Centre

Happy and grateful!

Sharing with you all- my book that got published. It’s on Amazon India

The ideation and conceptualisation of this book began during my research practices, with Andrea and Verena in our discussions, during our program on Politically Engaged Art Practices, at
,
Thank you

Let’s talk about Mountains, Rivers, Politics, Tea, and my Land: Each poem in this book carries a question. Some are quiet, some confrontational — but all circle around themes that have lingered in me: power, gender, intimacy, and the unseen labour embedded within capitalistic ideologies. These poems do not offer answers. Instead, they open spaces — to sit with discomfort, to reflect, and maybe, to reimagine.

Let’s talk about Mountains, Rivers, Politics, Tea and my Land, published by BookLeaf Publishing is now available to order on Amazon India.

https://www.amazon.in/Lets-about-Mountains-Rivers-Politics/dp/9369537538/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GZM9FMS0Q14S&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.mJ6Dy_wCPTIzK0Oaqbf0rg.L3RSF0ro9UO2kzz7u3xmfxbvH3wNyU8QInjSx0trSrA&dib_tag=se&keywords=9789369537532&qid=1763441282&sprefix=9789369537532%2Caps%2C233&sr=8

Teaching a seminar - invited by Hochschule Hannover - University of Applied Sciences and Arts , along with

The bachelor and masters program students on -
participants will explore the concepts of “Vermittlung” (mediation or facilitation), “künstlerisch” (artistic), and “Praxis” (practice). The seminar will feature practical exercises and discussions led by artists and researchers Chetna Mehrotra and Magali Sander Fett.

Seminar Focus
The seminar focuses on artistic mediation and facilitation, exploring the intersection of performance, education, healing, and social art. Participants will learn about and practice various artistic methods, including playback theater, dance, and embodied experiences.

Thank you Magali and Dr. Maren Witte for this invitation

It was dream come true to be with James Thompson- the amazing person and a professional, an academic and practitioner in the field of Applied Theatre studies.

It was great chance that he was in the Netherlands and I did want to miss the opportunity to listen to him.

Thank you and the Library at Artez for your support in organising this.
Thank you for the amazing facilitation of the event and my peers in the masters studies who came in to listen to him.

Thank you . You inspired many and opened many pathways for each of us!