Social Justice Theatre in India

Giant puppets. Monsoon storms. Children yelling on rooftops. Thirty goblin costumes. Social justice. Not chaos, but the experience of two Gustavus students spending a summer month teaching social justice theatre to youth in India.

Following the theatre and dance department’s announcement of a new focus on Social Justice through the Arts, fellow student Siddarth Selvaraj and I packed our bags and headed to Bangalore, India, in June (2007) to try it first-hand. With generous support from the Gustavus DYE Fund and the Center for Vocational Reflection, our goal was to teach workshops that use theatre to explore issues of justice and personal empowerment.

First on our list: Working with the Renegade Amateur Theater Society. Throughout the month, we led a series of workshops that culminated in the original, group-scripted performance “To Open a Box.” Fashioned as a giant carnival with a “Pandora’s Box,” the play offered the cast of talented high school students the opportunity to explore issues of social justice as they relate to their own lives. We talked about hot-button issues like feminism and homosexuality, as well as universal issues of teenagers everywhere—isolation and body image. The play opened to Bangalore audiences in August.

Next up, afternoons spent at Sameeksha: Center for Appropriate Learning, one of the few schools in Bangalore dedicated to the exclusive education of children with learning disabilities. Basing our workshops on the techniques of Brazilian theatre director/theorist Augusto Boal, we taught these young students new theatre games that emphasized creativity, patience, and teamwork to complete improvised scenes. The older students learned basic acting techniques and concluded the month with a presentation of contemporary theatre scenes for the entire school.

I’ve never seen children so excited to try something new. Whether we were running slow-motion races, holding mime competitions, or trying to build airplanes with our bodies, the kids at Sameeksha never ceased to amaze me in their creativity and desire to learn.

By the end of monsoon June we were a little wiser, wearier, and (substantially) wetter than when we began! We had found that the cliché was true: We had taught all these students so many things, but ultimately we learned more from them.

We went to India determined that with the right combination of guts, creativity, and blind luck we could accomplish anything. We left convinced that it was true.