Finding home in the act: How Aagaaz theatre trust empowers young lives through art

The arts-based community empowers children, teens, and working-class women to dream, challenge, and build a future where everyone belongs.

A familiar game of “dog and the bone” is transformed into an exercise in spatial awareness at the Aagaaz learning centre in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy

Six young people set out to find a new country. They are in search of a country that is green, with lots of rivers, maybe even a bit of snow, “like a screensaver”, one of them jokes, where people can be themselves without feeling shame or being ashamed of who they are. The old country is in a coma, and they mount a mournful vigil around her deathbed. They do not know if they are going to stay until the end, but they loved her and still do. So, they hesitantly stand around her hospital bed, waiting for a sign. These are scenes from Rihla, a play performed by the repertory group of the Aagaaz Theatre Trust.

Directed by Neel Chaudhuri, Rihla was first staged in 2019 and then remounted for a run of performances across 2023 and 2024. It is an adaptation of the Greek playwright Andreas Flourakis’ script titled I Want a Country, translated into Hindi by Rahul Rai in Aagaaz’s iteration. In January 2024, the Aagaaz repertory performed Rihla and another work, Bhagi Hui Ladkiyan, at Mumbai’s Harkat Studios.

Khwab Ghar is a learning centre, free library, and rehearsal space, packed into a warren of tiny rooms on the top floor of a building. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy

As a community of theatre practitioners and facilitators, Aagaaz makes theatre and offers arts-based learning to groups of children, adolescents, and women in working-class neighbourhoods in New Delhi. A large part of its work is concentrated in Nizamuddin Basti, the residential neighbourhood abutting the Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah in south-east Delhi, where it runs a community space, Khwab Ghar. Rihla’s performers emerged from Aagaaz’s decade-long community engagement in Nizamuddin.

The seeds for Aagaaz

The seeds for Aagaaz were sown when its founder and artistic director Sanyukta joined the Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Initiative as an arts education programme coordinator in 2009. Three years into this role, she quit to work on drama-based processes with 35 children from the area. The work goes on. “This kind of work doesn’t give you the satisfaction of a linear journey. There is a larger vision you have for the people you are working with to be able to find ways to voice their concerns with society, be able to act differently and find newer possibilities. It is not a finite process,” said Sanyukta, stressing the gradual and sustained rhythms of community work. The first milestone was when Ismail and Muzammil, now members of Aagaaz’s core team, enrolled in college under the extracurricular activities quota, based on their theatre work. The wins are small, but they are real, Sanyukta asserts, with a mammoth impact on how others in the extended community are able to imagine new possibilities for themselves.

Facilitators share a laugh at Aagaaz. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy

With Khwab Ghar, inaugurated in August 2023, Aagaaz was able to consolidate what was long a precarious physical presence in Nizamuddin. Khwab Ghar is a learning centre, free library, and rehearsal space, packed into a warren of tiny rooms on the top floor of a building. The library spills out into shelves along the lone corridor. When the facilitators need more space for an activity, they move to the terrace above. Many of them started at Aagaaz as primary school students in arts-based sessions facilitated by Sanyukta. They now hold leadership positions, managing the library and community mobilisation programmes, teaching and creating as artists, and working in administration and finance.

One November afternoon, some of them are refereeing a modified version of rumal jhapatta (“dog and the bone”) on the terrace. The players are all school-age children attending one of Aagaaz’s learning programmes. They walk up to the centre of the space and shake hands with their opponent, maintaining eye contact while making neat circles around a sock puppet on the ground. Sooner or later, one of them attempts to snatch the puppet and run back to their team without being touched or caught by their opponent. Played at Khwab Ghar, a familiar game is transformed into an exercise in spatial awareness, where the children focus on specific actions: making eye contact, slowing down and speeding up, and deploying movements across various levels in space.

Aagaaz makes theatre and offers arts-based learning to groups of children, adolescents and women in working class neighbourhoods in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy

The two teams in this game have picked names for themselves: BTS 1 and BTS 2, after the eponymous South Korean boy band they all idolise. As they play, in one corner, a distracted young participant uses wall-mounted potholders to hoist herself upside down. At the door of an office room below, a solitary leg comes into view. A toddler in one of Aagaaz’s kindergarten classes has decided to crawl across the floor, laughing and intermittently rolling on the ground as he does so.

Highlights

• As a community of theatre practitioners and facilitators, Aagaaz makes theatre and offers arts-based learning to groups of children, adolescents, and women in working-class neighbourhoods in New Delhi.
• The first milestone was when Ismail and Muzammil, now members of Aagaaz’s core team, enrolled in college under the extracurricular activities quota, based on their theatre work.
• With Khwab Ghar, inaugurated in August 2023, Aagaaz was able to consolidate what was long a precarious physical presence in Nizamuddin.
• Aagaaz’s interactions with the neighbourhood are grounded in an awareness of the familial and societal structures that govern possibilities of engagement within the community.

Experience and identities

Khwab Ghar encourages participants to work with their own experience and identities, no matter how chaotic things might get in the process. “You reduce stories as soon as you start looking for a grand narrative,” Sanyukta said. “We don’t want to be interventionist—to go into a community to help people because they need you. We want to find a way of creating a community-led way of working.” Aagaaz members are easily stereotyped or tokenised, as first-generation schoolgoers, for their socio-economic status and for battling oppressive gender norms. This informs their work but it does not need to perpetually define them, even hold them back. As the actors insist in Rihla, they can be whoever they want to be, with all the messy complexity that entails.

Rihla’s main prop is a wooden ladder. It forms the structure of the boat that carries people from the old country to the new one, acts as a place of safety and shelter when they are planning their next steps, and becomes a coffin for the old country, which the actors hoist on their shoulders. This easy adaptability is central to how performance is made and is also characteristic of Aagaaz’s work across its various programmes.

A glimpse of the activity at Aagaaz. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy

What does it mean to be a community-led space? The children playing on the Khwab Ghar rooftop are the second generation of learners Aagaaz has engaged with in Nizamuddin. A lot of work goes into building and sustaining relationships with the community. There are days dedicated to learning sessions and dialogues with facilitators so that they are able to continue to grow personally and professionally. There are drama jams and sessions with a facilitators’ collective, to enable practice sharing with other artists and practitioners in New Delhi.

Community connect

On Tuesdays, Open Library days at Khwab Ghar, facilitators go out into the neighbourhood to invite people into the space. Their interactions are grounded in an awareness of the familial and societal structures that govern possibilities of engagement within the community. “Theatre is a sin and you shouldn’t be doing it,” Zainab’s family told her. They were unhappy with how boys and girls could freely interact in activities at Aagaaz, forcing the actor, facilitator, and library programme leader to take a short break from theatre. However, Zainab’s mother has since grown to trust Sanyukta; the latter speaks to her regularly and has built a relationship with her. With her mother’s support, Zainab was able to negotiate the socioreligious pressures that affected her choice of a career in theatre.

The children at Khwab Ghar are the second generation of learners Aagaaz has engaged with in Nizamuddin. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy

When the repertory started working on Rihla in 2019, many of its actors were at an important juncture in their own lives. Some of them were in class X or XII, both key academic milestones, while others were just beginning college and developing a sense of who they wanted to be as adults. Flourakis’ script was open-ended, with lots of room for improvisation. They worked to understand its central premise of imagining a new country. In the years that followed the premiere, social and political developments in India rooted that premise in experience. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, passed in 2019, followed by the COVID-19 lockdown changed how they approached the script, in the sense of exclusion these events perpetrated.

“We don’t have our country, we don’t even have a space we can call our own. We’ve performed this before, but it feels different now: we feel the script in our bodies now. The issues addressed in Rihla resonate with what is happening in society at the moment: be it in Palestine or Manipur,” said Nagina, one of the actors and a community programme and mobilisation leader at Aagaaz. She quotes her favourite line from the play: “Main aisa desh chahti hu jo anth mein meri hatya na karein.” (I want a country that doesn’t murder me in the end.) For Nagina, Rihla addresses the question of what it means to belong to a country in these times, from the playful to the perilous.

Ranjana Dave is an independent artist and writer. She explores how people build relationships with other people, ideas, objects and ecologies—what makes us social beings. She is the editor of Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance (Tulika Books, 2021).