Festival Archives

Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

Ee Gida, Aa Mara translates from Kannada to This Plant, That Tree. The play magnifies the micro environments they house through movement, visuals and sound. The play aims to create an experience for toddlers even before speech has emerged in their life. Creating a world of seeds, leaves and gentle sounds, the play tries to help an infant in collecting experiences that may help it make sense of the world around.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

‘Desdemona Roopakam’ is a play that looks at the narratives of missing women in epics and is sung entirely like a Chamber Opera using Carnatic, Hindustani and Folk music.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

Based on Ernest Hemingway’s novella, this is the story of an epic struggle between an old, seasoned fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. For 84 days he has returned home empty-handed. On the 85th day he sets out far beyond into the sea and drops his lines. At noon, a big fish, which he calls Mari, takes the bait but the old man cannot pull it out. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat. For five days the old man struggles with the fish, with sharks and with the sea, to survive and get back home.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

While playing one day, Chippi, a baby lizard, is shooed away. People think she is scary and ugly. In shock, Chippi loses her tail. Everyone starts calling her names, as she is tailless now. She feels sorry for herself and cries in a dark corner. Chippi knows she has to get a tail. So what will she do to get her tail back? Will Chippi be beautiful again?

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

From childhood to old age, a human life goes through various stages, physically and emotionally. A child becoming an old person or an old person becoming a child, thus completing the circle of life, is a miracle as each stage of life has its own unique gift to give to humanity.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

Three intriguing stories some together seamlessly to talk about strength and hope and how life without hope is impossible to sustain. Out of these three narratives, two are from young contemporary Rajasthani writers Arvind Charan and Chirag Khandelwal, while the story which lays foundation for the performance is written by renowned Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

‘Nava’ tells the stories of 9 urban trans women through the 9 rasas (Navarasa). In this performance, the 9 trans women, who have never been on stage before, bring their bodies, voices and stories, deliberately silenced and willfully ignored to reclaim their rightful place – the centrestage.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

‘Jo Dooba So Paar’ throws light on the person that Ameer Khusrau was, his relationship with his Guru Nizamuddin Auliya and the advent of Qawwali through them. The interesting anecdotes and tales woven in a Dastaan accompanied with live Qawwali singing give insight about the essence of Sufism and the importance of the eternally relevant message of love among humankind.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

“I just lit up. I did not burn”

In a remote Tibetan village, Deshar, a young runaway has disowned her father Tsering and become a Buddhist nun. In Lhasa, Chinese Commander Deng is working for the future of the country, unable to meet the needs of his wife and daughter.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

An original script based on real-life testimonies and poems from the workers at the ILVA steel plant in Taranto. ‘Made in Ilva’ is a masterpiece of physical theatre, exploring the impact of the biggest steelworks of Europe on the environment and surrounding population. The performance is a perfect combination of extreme physical actions, sounds that become obsessive rhythms, original music, vocals and video projections. An emotional and poetic exploration of the alienation and oppression of a human body reduced to an artificial machine.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

Lavanya Katta is a performance devised in collaboration with Lavani and Tamasha artists. In this performance we follow the journey/story of Lavani through the years. Lavani being part of Maharashtra’s folk tradition has evolved over the times with changes in social, political and cultural developments as well as changing audience preferences. It has not just survived but thrived through these changing times and has become a part of the contemporary cultural identity.

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Project By Savita Rani

‘Notion(s): In Between You & Me’ is a devised solo performance supported by Serendipity Arts Grants (Theatre). Notions form an important aspect of the power structure that never allow us to question the way things work. For example, notions like purity, superiority and power are traded in our respective societies like commodities making them extremely difficult to challenge. These are intangible but heavily responsible facets of attributed identities. Can we see these notions? Can we modify them? This is a performer’s effort as an individual to understand these very notions while bringing the attention from the personal to political, while strengthening the relationship between the self, the other and the world.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

111 is a duet between a ballet dancer (Eve Mutso from Estonia) and a paraplegic dancer (Joel Brown from Scotland). Commissioned and supported by Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, 111 is a powerful and poignant piece exploring different strengths and vulnerabilities, both physical and otherwise. The title of this show derives from Joel Brown having 11 working vertebrae (out of 33) and his perception that his collaborator Eve Brown, is so virtuosic that she appears to have 100.

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Project By Tsering Bawa, Tenzin Yonten, Nyima Dhondup, Tenzin Palsang, Kalsang Dolma

Tibetan artists will introduce interested participants to their rich cultural heritage. Be prepared to speak, sing and dance, and learn the fundamentals of TIbetan music and dance while also having fun.

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Project By Ajeet Singh Palawat, Ipshita Chakroborty Singh, Mahesh Saini, Puneet Mishra, Bhaskar Sharma, Bharati Perwani

The workshop will be focused on how what is being said changes because of our breathing, and will include a series of voice and breathing excercises.

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Project By Dadi Pudumjee

An interactive lecture-demonstration of the various techniques of puppetry used by the Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust, focusing on puppet movement, emotion, masks, objects and the puppet in relation to the human actor/dancer.

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Curated By Quasar Thakore Padamsee

Who said smashing things up was a bad thing? Three strangers are about to face their demons head on when their lives collide. Balanced precariously on the tipping point, they might just be able to save one another. If they can only overcome their urge to self-destruct. Painful yet playful, poignant but uplifting, this play takes a long hard look at the extremes of everyday life. Questions of identity, heartbreak and hope are explored with vivid, poetic intensity.

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Project By Nicola Pianzola and Anna Dona Dorno

Participants will learn to amplify their body’s listening skills in relation to the impulses coming from the external environment and from the group, through individual and collective exercises, exploring some techniques aimed to improve their scenic presence. The aim is to investigate the difference between organic and inorganic actions.

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Project By Ajitesh Gupta and Mohit Agarwal

In a performance like Dastaangoi where you break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience, how do you establish a connection? This workshop focusses on providing the participants with the tools for tapping into that connection.

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Project By Amitesh Grover

Amitesh Grover’s The Money Opera is an immersive theatre production created as a site-specific project. Housed in a 5-storey abandoned building, it contains songs and stories of ambition, guilt, fear, desire, love, community, and many others that reveal the nature of contemporary society — what it keeps hidden, oppressed, and buried. In this unnamed building, you meet an oracle, a mourner, a salesman, a dreamer, a thief, a divine child, a rebel, a broker, and several others, who hammer at society’s facade and tell us about the extent to which they go to survive in, or fight against the system — how money breaks them or makes them, forsakes or awakens them. The Money Opera is an experimental production where audiences enter a building and spend time with characters (played by actors and real life professionals) in a dystopic universe. Like the free-market economy, this is free-wheeling theatre, where the audience chooses what they watch, how they watch, but are in little control of what occurs inside the building.

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