Theatre The meeting point of dissent and resistance.
Sanjay Kumar has been a theatre activist for three decades. As Founding President of pandies’ theatre (1993), his major work has been with the pandies. His area of work covers four broad spectrums:
- Proscenium performance: adaptations and original scripts for the proscenium, first staged in a professional theatre and then also used in protest and street theatre as part of theatre based development agendas.
- Protest theatre: Against the mainstream and mainstreaming processes; Using theatre to take up issues ranging from feminist theatre to gay rights to child rights and rights of religious minorities. This includes legal and legislative intervention and campaigning for policy change.
- Workshop theatre: Third and the most focussed area lies in creating theatre with young people with a view to articulating trauma, containing conflict and getting space for marginalised voices in legislative reform and policy formulation. Merging of Eastern and Western workshop traditions and evolving a complex but flexible form, his innovations and experience here making him a pioneer in the field of Performance activism.
- Hybrid Cyber theatre: Physical theatre becomes important as the pandemic recedes but seminal gains have been made in the form of cyber theatre during lockdowns. The techniques, the politics and the awesome reach. He is at the moment involved in experimenting with a hybrid mode of theatre where stage and cyber theatre meet.