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.
Richa Nagar’s pedagogy has been committed to fostering anti-disciplinary feminist engagements for justice, in and beyond the classroom. Working in and across multiple fields in the humanities, arts, and the social sciences, as well as in the context of people’s movements and community-based theater, she has created opportunities for her students to learn from, and to collaborate with, scholars, artists, and activists–locally, regionally, and transnationally. Her pedagogy has illuminated how collaborative learning can foster a more equitable and just world, and the ways in which it demands a continuous unlearning and relearning of stories and struggles that co-constitute the politics of the global and the intimate.
For Richa Nagar, theater, theory, pedagogy, and the work of building situated solidaries go hand in hand. Theatre is a process through which the mind-body-soul learns to be simultaneously ethical, political, and aesthetical. Through this process, the mind-body-soul begins to understand theory as inseparable from movement, and it grapples with movement as co-learning that mobilizes the intellect, muscles, breath, and emotions of the individual in conversation with the collective. As such, theater becomes a tool to refuse the separation among the political, the intellectual, and the artistic in order to advance visions and struggles for justice.
Richa’s explorations with Tarun Kumar in the realm of theatre have led to the birth of Parakh Theatre, a mode of learning, improvisation and embodied theorizing across multiple sites including Mumbai, Lucknow, and Minneapolis and they have also sowed the seeds of Sangtin Kala Manch with Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) in Sitapur District of India’s Uttar Pradesh. Selected moments and texts from this work can be found here.
SANGTIN KALA MANCH is an artistic forum through which the everyday experiences and political visions of SKMS saathis (members) find an expression. Saathis regularly come together to create plays about their everyday struggles. Richa Nagar’s role in this process has focused on helping to develop content that foregrounds saathis’ stories and experiences and on exploring forms of storytelling, dialogue, and music that can be improvised by saathis without relying on written scripts.
PARAKH THEATRE GROUP 