Workshop by Lois Weaver

November 2012 ‘Where do you come from?’ – I am rolling this question around in my mind, trying to remember where I come from. From Kolkata? From India? From Bangladesh? From homelessness? From an undefined state of nostalgia? As Lois Weaver introduced several questions for us to think about when we all sat around a circle, I realized we were going somewhere from ‘here’ – the present moment. Within the next few days, about fifteen of us were grouping and regrouping together, playing games, brainstorming ideas, creating rituals and performance…

Getting On, a Backstage Tour

Location: San Francisco Senior CenterDate / Time: September 14-17, 2012, 10:30pm-12:30pm This Open Theatre Workshop is run by internationally acclaimed Artists and Theatre Professors Lois Weaver (Queen Mary University of London), Helen Paris and Leslie Hill (Stanford University). ‘Getting On, a backstage tour’ is a two-part theatre workshop in which we play with notions of ‘age fright’ through metaphor of ‘stage fright’. We will work on creative responses to ageing and encouraging participants to embody, then narrate an experience of ‘backstage’ where we might find each other as we stand…

CRY 2012

Summer 2012 Performance workshop with the underprivileged children of Dhakuria, Kolkata Excerpt from Stanford | Center for South Asia Fellowship Recipients page | (link) This summer, my project is going to be similar to my previous volunteering activities with CRY (Child Relief and You, a non-profit organization, which works with and for underprivileged children) in Kolkata. I will be working with children from their organization, and will be conducting various performance workshops for them. These workshops will be in the form of games and exercises, which will be loosely based…