Rangbhumi : A happy playground

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Rangbhumi : A happy playground

Rangbhumi's vision is to spread joyousness, power of expression, compassion & a sense of equivalence among people through Applied Theatre Based facilitation.

We work in the area of Applied Theatre with children, youths and adults. Rangbhumi was founded with a vision of spreading joyousness, abundance,
power of expression, compassion, love and a sense of equivalence amongst
people. Hence, the name Rangbhumi: a happy playground. A learning space
wherein we employ approach of happy and varied colours of arts and
performing art forms like Drama for Learning, Theater of Oppressed, Dance
Movement Therapy, Playback Theater and Image Management. Arts-based training can be defined as human development training, delivered
through various arts disciplines to develop trust, find shared values and shift
perceptions. As an organisation, we believe passionately in the power of art forms and the
wondrous ability they carry for a personal transformation thereby leading to a
community and societal shift in the humanism of everyday living.

24/12/2025

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

13/12/2025

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 -

09/12/2025

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.

02/12/2025

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
———————————————————————-

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

18/11/2025

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

30/10/2025

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

26/10/2025

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!

06/09/2025

(Research - how does vulnerability of the performance in a participatory theatre shift the performer and participant dynamics? )

Participatory and Dialogue-Led Performance on the Cultural Framework of the Organisation

Through participatory theatre and dialogue-based conversation, we explored the challenges, dilemmas, and “stuck” points that different stakeholders within an organisation experience. Each individual is in a unique journey and life stage, and the work environment often creates differential perspectives on the values that govern the organisational system.

The performance invited interventions and critical inquiry from the audience. Many shared that they found the performance deeply real and resonant with their own lives. They spoke about moments of vulnerability, times when they too had felt stuck or caught in a dilemma.

Participants entered the performance not as external observers but as co-creators of meaning. When invited to intervene and intra-act in scenes as “spect-actors”, audience members resonated with the struggles portrayed, often acknowledging moments of vulnerability in their own professional lives. Vulnerability became a mode of entry into dialogue: as performers revealed their inner conflicts, spectators recognised parallels in their own experiences, thereby blurring the boundary between stage and organisational reality. This process facilitated a shift from individual recognition of struggle to collective exploration of agency.

Another key convention used was the “Super Helper,” a dramatic technique in which a scene is frozen at a point and the audience is invited to intervene. In this format, performers enact a situation of struggle or dilemma and then suspend the action, signalling the need for new possibilities. Audience members, stepping into the role of “Super Helpers,” propose strategies, perspectives, or alternative actions for the character. These interventions are not hypothetical abstractions but are often grounded in the spectators’ own lived realities, professional experiences, and tacit knowledge.

CONTINUED in comments

25/08/2025

In Mumbai-

Open for anyone who is keen in community based practices, socially engaged arts, community theatre, or people working in the NGO sector

Through my practice in Applied Theatre and socially engaged arts, my work examines how Playback Theatre can operate as a praxis model, an iterative cycle of action, reflection, and further action, within community contexts. This approach positions Playback not merely as a performative mode of storytelling, but as a critical and dialogical practice attentive to the lived realities of participants.

It asks: How might Playback Theatre contribute to communities seeking solutions and possibilities within their specific social, cultural, and political contexts?

This workshop will introduce the foundation of Playback Theatre, while simultaneously opening a space for collective inquiry. Participants will engage with questions of how Playback may be understood not only as a performative tool, but also as a practice of transformation, expanding the form toward futures grounded in reciprocity, action, and community agency.

23/08/2025

The session on drama-based pedagogy was designed for educators working in schools and for teachers engaged with children in community-based NGOs. We began by introducing the foundational framework of drama-based pedagogy, demonstrating how classrooms can be made more engaging through the integration of drama conventions into the curriculum. Strategies such as Teacher-in-Role, Signs, and Whoosh were employed to illustrate how imaginative and embodied tools, alongside aesthetic approaches, can facilitate critical inquiry, surface lived experiences, and connect with the social and cultural histories that students bring into the classroom.
This process was explicitly connected to my framework of TETLA by Chetna Mehrotra(Theatre for Imaging, Truth, and Liberatory Actions), which positions drama as a space for envisioning alternative realities (imaging), interrogating and surfacing hidden or silenced narratives (truth), and creating possibilities for social transformation (liberatory actions). Within this framework, drama is not simply a pedagogical technique but a critical praxis that bridges imagination with critical consciousness, enabling learners to move from reflection to action.
The session further engaged with the ideological framework of education, drawing on Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of teaching, and invited participants to reconsider the nature of learning, the role of the child, and the role of the teacher within dialogic and participatory classrooms. To ground these concepts in practice, participants stepped into and experienced drama conventions through the story of Kabuliwala, set against the backdrop of the Anglo-Afghan Wars. This performative exploration generated a dialogic circle in which participants moved beyond the literary narrative to interrogate historical and contemporary realities of marginalisation and oppression. In doing so, the session exemplified the principles of TETLA, foregrounding how drama can open spaces for critical dialogue, empathy, and liberatory possibilities in education.

27/07/2025

Integration of Playback Theatre within a micro-credit program titled “Applied Theatre at the Intersectionality of Education and Healing” offered to undergraduate B.Sc. Psychology students.

Through the program, we employed Playback Theatre as a participatory, embodied method to explore themes of emotional exhaustion, relational disconnection, and the psychosocial impact of urban isolation on youth.
Participants were invited to share personal narratives, particularly concerning their experiences with friendship, family, intimacy, mental health, and trauma, in a performative and reflective setting. The urban context, marked by digital saturation and diminishing communal intimacy, gave rise to stories reflecting loneliness, fragmented relational ties, and a desire for mutual, emotionally resonant connections. Playback Theatre served as a containment space, in which these stories were enacted back to participants, facilitating collective witnessing and empathic resonance.

The process of sharing a personal story in a public space invites the storyteller (teller) to engage in self-observation and meaning-making, key elements of reflective practice.
One of the fundamental principle of the David Schön’s an educationist and a philosopher, reflection model is the idea of the “reflective conversation.” This refers to the internal dialogue that individuals engage in as they reflect on their experiences. By examining the underlying reasons and motivations behind their actions, individuals can identify patterns, make connections, and gain a deeper understanding of themselves.

Playback Theatre also serves a reparative function, a space for healing, integration, and social repair. Playback Theatre is not merely cathartic; it becomes reparative through its relational structure. The presence of witnesses, the intentionality of the actors, and the non-judgmental space offer corrective emotional experiences, in which previously unheld or invalidated emotions are finally seen, heard, and honored.Applied theatre methodologies like Playback Theatre, when integrated into education, act as therapeutic pedagogies that foster self-awareness and emotional expression.

26/07/2025

Micro credit program by Rangbhumi Applied Theatre on “Applied Theatre in the intersectionality of Education and Healing”- for II year B.Sc Psychology students

Our final day presentation as a public performance .

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Vihar Lake Road, Powai
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