PARAKH THEATRE GROUP

PARAKH can be translated as critical eye or mindful scrutiny. In Parakh Theatre, this scrutiny happens through a full immersion of BodySoulMind. Artists and audiences from diverse and unequal locations, languages, and journeys come together to critically engage with sociopolitical, ecological, and epistemic injustices and structures of violence that shape our lives, and in which we ourselves are implicated. We reflect, challenge, and dream through all creative expressions available to us, including fiction, poetry, theatre, music, and multi-genre performance. We connect written texts, inherited narratives, memories, and events from near and far with our own lives to learn from one another, and to share that learning in the form of performance. In this work, feeling-thinking-dreaming-unlearning-relearning-unmaking-remaking becomes an endless movement: A movement that mobilizes emotions and intellect, memory and muscles, breath and bones of each individual in an endless entanglement with the other co-creators. Since the inception of this work in 2006 with the joint efforts of Tarun Kumar, Richa Nagar, and Mumtaz Sheikh, Parakh Theatre has evolved a distinctive mode of co-learning, improvisation, and co-creation across multiple sites, including Mumbai, Lucknow, and Minneapolis, and it also seeded Sangtin Kala Manch with saathis of Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh.