Vandana Asha

Vandana has been passionate about performance from a young age. During her school years, she started learning classical singing, and would participate in all co-curricular activities. While pursuing her graduation, she was part of a professional dance group. She has always been interested in stories, and while studying media and journalism, she explored topics such as film-making, creative writing and radio. During those years she was also part of a Theatre company. She believes art shaped her life. It taught her compassion, empathy and sensitivity. She spent her college years volunteering with various NGO's; applying theatre practices she had learnt.

When she attended a workshop on Theatre of the Oppressed (T.O.), it changed her ideas of working with a community. She used to think of herself as an expert who understood their problems and wanted to solve them. Practicing T.O., however, made her understand how working for a community is different from working with the community. She started looking at the children as co-owners of the space and they started taking responsibility for how the workshop should move forward. The focus shifted to having a space to talk about the system, power and stigmas rather than finding solutions for it. This developed the idea of a collaborative and co-owned space.

Founder

Rang Karwan

Rang Karwan as an endeavour is building opportunities to engage in artistic and collaborative spaces that will encourage communities (especially adolescents and youth) to come together to build and share the process of knowledge creation and exploration. In this result oriented and competitive world, our educational institutions lack social-emotional learning and life skills. Hence we find anxiety and under-confidence in today’s youth. We, as a society, also stigmatize issues and we fear to speak against oppression and often internalize it. To work on this, there is a large need for non-judgemental and inclusive spaces for learning and self-expression to be able to deeply understand the relationship between yourself, your immediate surroundings, and the world at large.

Superpowers

Arts based Facilitation using different art forms amalgamated with theatre

Using forms such as - creative drama, psychodrama, expressive arts, dance and movement rhythm, and music play-back theatre - as a tool to explore and understand the basics of theatre and the art of storytelling.

Theatre of the Oppressed

As created by Brazilian theatre visionary , Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (T.O.) is a form of popular community-based education that uses theatre as a tool for social change. Vandana uses it with different communities, bringing them together (concepts of solidarity and togetherness), to recognise oppression and how to deal with it, understand power structures and understand social and personal issues on various levels.

Expressive arts Facilitation

In this fast paced world, anxiety and stress are very common in people and we need non-judgmental spaces to express and be our own true selves. Vandana uses expressive arts to create safe and inclusive space for exploring, understanding and accepting yourself, team building (working in groups with unity, empathy and understanding), healing / therapeutic approach and emotional management.

Dance and Drama / Musical Theatre

Story telling

Team building workshop