Open Space Ahmedabad completed six months this June. Our objective was simple : bridge inter-community divides using collective participation of youth in group activities that are engaging and entertaining. In these six months, OS-A has successfully brought 13 events to our city youth. My experience as an OS Fellow in Ahmedabad, during this time, has shown that inter-community interaction works best in group-activity workshops that last more than a day and/or at least six-eight hours if a day-long event. The vox pop film-making workshop brought out this quite successfully (it was a month-long event) and so did the RTI workshop where the six-hour workshop and group activity worked very well. Adopting the same method for the theatre workshop -- a four-hour-a-day, five-day event -- the Open Space Ahmedabad theatre workshop, based on the theme of 'Social Exclusion', proved to be our most successful event so far.
Participants during a theatre game displaying the skill of gauging the body language of a co-artiste
The Ahmedabad Theatre Group, led by prominent award-winning Gujarati theatre artiste and former National School of Drama graduate, Rajoo Barot, conducted the workshop, perfectly balancing the theme of the workshop with the skills of theatre using the ‘guru-chela’ snippets by noted writer Asghar Wajahat as scripts for group skits.
Mugdha and Hitesh perform under the keen supervision of Rajoobhai
Along with learning the ropes of theatre, the workshop also became a forum for willful interaction between the Hindu and Muslim participants. It was perhaps the five days of a collective activity that brought the participants into a familiar circle. Without our intervention and more out of curiosity, each asked the other questions that have perplexed them about religion : triple talaq, cremation versus burial of dead bodies, non-vegetarianism, Sunni-Shia, ‘jumme-jumme nahana’ i.e. the perceived practice among Muslims of bathing only on Fridays, were some of the questions put across to Muslim participants. This was a very significant occurrence – as many participants told me – because they had never got a chance to interact with Muslims on these issues earlier.
Imran rehearses a scene with Rajoobhai
Jaideep and Anurag enact an Asghar Wajahat script
Mehjabeen with Alex on the final day of the workshop
Open Space Ahmedabad is grateful to its team of partners, including Ahmedabad Theatre Group, RH Patel Arts and Commerce College, Promoting Arts Network and St. Xavier's Behavioural Science Centre for this event.
