Street Theatre

W A L K 

made in response to the horrific gang rape and tragic death of Jyoti Singh on a moving bus on 
Dec. 16, 2012 



                                    

                                           WALK, Jaipur Litt. Festival, Jan. 21, 2013


                                                   More than 15, 000 hits on youtube.....


 US tour - residency, performances, talks, workshops in 5 colleges and universities across America, Oct - Nov., 2013





From Sara Matchett
Senior Lecturer: Drama Department, Univ. of Cape Town , S. Africa
Artistic Director: The Mothertongue Project

Thought I'd try and write down my experience of your performance.... It's hard to articulate what was evoked in me, but I will try as best I can.  It was most definitely not a cognitive experience, but rather a visceral somatic one....


With The Walk, something started to bubble in the pit of my stomach. Slowly it started to rise up through my chest and up to my eyes. This feeling stayed with me, even as I went to sleep. It is still with me, even as I write this now.  I feel very tearful, deeply moved and somewhat internal.
Words  are unable to express this felt sense. It's like you pulled me inside you, into your core. And from this place your call placed itself in me, to continue and extend the call…

I realised, viscerally, how through the performance we have made in South Africa, we carry your legacy. I realised how big the work is. I've always known how important it is, but somehow yesterday I was struck differently. These works in conversation make somatic sense. The resonances are palpable.

Here is a link to a performance we did at The Cape Town Fringe Festival 2014 in a dingy gothic club.  The lighting was very sparse, so the footage looses focus from time to time. Here it is:  https://youtu.be/V7JgPV8nflo



From Kaite O'Reilly
Winner of Ted Hughes Award for New Works in Poetry 2011


"The fantastic theatre maker, Kathakali performer, teacher and Theatre in Education practitioner Maya Krishna Rao. 
I am working in Berlin, as a fellow of Freie University’s International Research Centre: Interweaving Performance Cultures. Earlier this week I attended a talk and presentation by Maya Krishna Rao, whose words on process and creativity were illuminating and exhilarating...
Her performance work is improvised, working often alone with a video camera, and music. What sparks her when starting out is the tension between the small and the big. The small might be a tiny event, or a prop or object which is of use; the big is an historical landscape, and it is the tension between these, disparate things coming together, which can surprise and create the initial spark...

As she described this process, I was struck by the way she stayed true to the tasks she had set herself, and trusted both herself and the process, even though she was in the midst of creating it."

posted on Sept. 14, 2012


kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com


OM SWAHA




As founder member of Theatre Union, a street theatre group formed in 1979, Maya collaborated to make and perform two street plays, Om Swaha  (on dowry, 1979) and       Dafa no. 180 (on the Indian law on conviction for rape, 1981). Both plays toured several colleges, parks and other out door spaces in and out of Delhi. Om Swaha went on to become a popular play with various womens' and other groups and was translated and performed in several languages all over India