To share the art of crafting participatory shadow theatre, we teamed up with Living Stages to offer a Shadow Liberation workshop titled, Devising Forum Theatre with Shadows, at Headwaters Theatre in Portland, OR.

What started out as a a couple stories about misogyny, grew more complex as the group physically improvised visual narratives without dialogue. The workshop was followed by an artist talk by Evan Hastings where he told the story of Shadow Liberation.

Behind the shadow scenes in the LOK studio in South Kolkata, a group of young theatre artists improvise with sound and shadows toward a vision for the future of India's Youth Theatre Movement. Beyond naming the obvious struggles of financial resources, lack of platforms for artists and group cohesion issues, we got into the issue of language, the hegemony of English, and division of Theatre artists and groups along linguistic lines. We did physical explorations of shadow theatre as a visual language to address the struggles of young theatre artists creating new work.

Shadow Liberation workshop for Asia's Theatre of Oppressed Network at South/Central Asia's 1st Regional Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Kabul, Afghanistan with Afghanistan Human Rights & Democracy Organization.

Ramayana Remix lit up ADA Ranga Mandira with a Workshop & Preview Performance. This contemporary retelling integrated elements of Playback Theatre, Forum Theatre and Shadow Theatre to allow the audience to remix the epic. The performance was well received and the audience was particularly vocal about the Agni Pariksha.






Ramayana Remix is a collaboration between Shadow Liberation and Yours Truly Theatre.

To be honest the whole trip was completely opposite (in a good way) to what I had expected it to be like. ' To Adjust ' is one of the main things I learned there. It was really nice to meet the Pulavars. They were beautiful hosts and very sweet people who were willing to go to any extent to make us feel comfortable and at home. The trip was filled with laughter and enjoyment and ofcourse beautiful art works by the entire batch . :)

Thol Pava Koothu being a tradition followed for years was obviously very engaging. Little little stories related to this were very fascinating. The puppet making process involves a lot of physical labour but its worth it when it comes to the performance part. The tradition of using 'DIYA' lamps instead of bulbs was just beautiful. I guess it adds the whole storytelling a real touch. I guess with the whole experience of Thol Pava Koothu I've learned that staying close to your roots always does the magic. Be it the performance or the traditional way of puppet making without electrical machines.