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Randhir's

THEATRE &
CREATIVE EDUCATION
 

                              His theatre involvements started when he was still in Calcutta and he played a catalystic role in the vanguard of the new dramatic movements emerging in the region. He was actively a part of the Anglo-Bengali theatre scene, writing, producing, directing, set designing and painting, light designing, choreographing and performing in plays in the city, winning innumerable awards at festivals.

When he moved to Mumbai, he began applying his substantial theatre experience first to Street and Protest Theatre then to education. He began working with leading educational institutions in the city, using creative theatre approaches to learning and social development in the classroom and then moved on to using various forms of creative expression - creative writing, theatre and the visual arts. Max Mueller Bhavan in Mumbai sponsored a number of creative workshops for children in which he effectively used the arts for social and cultural expression.

 

He then used his creative experience for classroom learning and therapeutic purposes for severely disabled children and young people at the Spastics Society's Centre for Special Education in Mumbai where he used the arts as a powerful medium for psychological, speech and physiotherapy and for creative expression. In the process he introduced creative education as an integration tool. Extending his approach further, he began to train teachers and other creative educationists, preparing them to work with special children and young people, using a multi-art strategy.

National Society For Clean CitiesHis creative education work then went on to include children and young people from socially and economically deprived areas. This brought him in touch with street children at the National Society For Clean Cities' Children’s Complex in Bandra, Mumbai. At the Complex he worked for over a year with deprived children and helped them shape their own musical play, build and paint the sets, evolve and execute face and body painting designs, make and paint animal masks and create their own music.

Extending his creative education approach nationally, he went on to work in Delhi with the Times Of India's programmed called Newspapers In Education. As part of the programme, he worked creatively with children and young people from 60 schools in the Capital. He also worked on multi-art programmes with municipal schools children and teachers in the city.

In Bhopal, he worked with thirty families of traditional puppeteers, developing with them, new scripts, designed and painted new sets and evolved new approaches to lyric writing.

 

He became a member of the National Institute For Design's (Ahmedabad) Visiting Faculty and conducted creative writing and communication workshops with undergraduates at the institute.

He has also worked with M.A. students at the SNDT University (Mumbai), adult participants at a multi-art workshop at British Library (Pune), with school children at a workshop sponsored by the Indian National Trust For Art And Culture Heritage at the Nowrosjee Wadia CollegeNational Gallery For Modern Art (Mumbai) and conducts regular creative writing and appreciation courses for children, young adults and adults in Pune and Mumbai.

Randhir was also Professor of Literature in the Post-graduate Dept. Of English of the Nowrosjee Wadia College in Pune from 2004-2006.

Randhir at work.

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