Subhashim Goswami
Direction
An academic and practising theatre artist. He teaches and heads the Department of Sociology
at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR, where his work
turns on methodology, ethnography, visuality, and the interface between art and research.
He has directed all three of the company's plays. Toddler theatre is not a passion on the side:
he thinks through the making of these plays to ask how ethnography, and sociology and anthropology
as disciplines, get made. He has published on anthropological method, pedagogy, masculinity and
decoloniality. On the rehearsal floor, how the tactile creates the sensorial is a question he
doesn't mind living with.
Stories in Half · Dinner is at 8 · Bends & Flows
Samta Shikhar
Performer
A theatre pedagogue and actor who has worked with children as a theatre facilitator for more
than a decade, nationally and internationally. Her approach to theatre with and for children has
been shared in workshops and through performances with children, teachers, artists and
pedagogues.
She makes plays with children and acts in plays for children, and creates work for toddlers.
She currently heads the theatre department at Head Start Educational Academy, Bengaluru.
Stories in Half · Dinner is at 8 · Bends & Flows
Ashwini Kumar Chakre
Performer, co-direction
A theatre practitioner, writer and director, and one of the founding members of Mashaal Theatre Troupe in Bengaluru, in 2006. He has worked in theatre since 2004, across acting, writing and directing, and across proscenium, public and alternative spaces, for audiences ranging from adults to children and the early years.
He was part of Directors Lab 2013 at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York, and trained in playwriting at Writers Bloc IV, organised by Rage Theatre in association with the Royal Court Theatre, London. He also works in education as a theatre pedagogue and teacher, with a particular interest in mathematics.
Stories in Half · Dinner is at 8
Pratyush Singh
Performer
A theatre-maker and a designer. He began in theatre in college in 2001, co-founded
Mashaal Theatre Troupe in Bengaluru in 2006, and in 2015 founded Mithya Labs, a software
development company, where he is design head.
Both practices ask him the same question: how people meet a thing that has been made for
them. In theatre for the very young the question doubles, because every performance plays to two
audiences at once: the child, and the adult who carried them in. The play is not for one
over the shoulder of the other.
Dinner is at 8
Shrunga B.V.
Performer
An actor, puppeteer and actor trainer based in Bengaluru, who also narrates audiobooks and works as a translator. He was introduced to theatre in 2004, and has since worked with many companies and with renowned directors across India and Germany.
He won Best Actor at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards in 2019, and was a fellow of the Theatertreffen at the Berliner Festspiele in 2021.
Bends & Flows
Apoorva Arthur
Performer
A theatre artist, percussionist, actor trainer and Kalaripayattu practitioner. She began
at Ranga Shankara in Bengaluru, trained with Kanhailal and Ima Sabitri at Kalakshetra Manipur, and
worked at Adishakti Theatre Laboratory in Pondicherry, performing in Veenapani Chawla’s
The Tenth Head and Ganapati and facilitating its Source of Performance Energy
workshop for eight years.
She is the first woman to formally study the Mizhav (the copper drum of Koodiyattam,
Kerala’s Sanskrit theatre) at Kerala Kalamandalam. Her own practice, Axis Fluidity, brings
Kalaripayattu into dialogue with breath, movement and sound.
Stories in Half
