Performing Gender

Yuki Ellias is an actor, theatre- director and corporate coach. She trained at the Jacques Lecoq School of Theatre in Paris and is a trained pedagogue from the London International School of Performing Arts. She has performed in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Italy and India. Her theatre company Dur Se Brothers has produced the multi-award winning play ‘Elephant in the Room’ which has travelled to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Zimbabwe, Singapore, Perth and Hong Kong Hello. Her other shows include ‘Hello Farmaaish’, ‘Yatagarasu’ and ‘Basti Mein Masti’.

She has been part of the faculty at the Drama School, Mumbai. She co-curated a seminar series on ‘Copyrights and Ethics: Best Practices for Professional Theatre-Artists’ and a seminar on ‘The Economics of Creating a Play’.

Sharanya Ramprakash is a theatre maker whose work experiments with language, tradition and gender. She writes, acts, directs and collaborates with a range of forms, communities and theatre makers across local, national and international locations.

Her latest work includes ‘Akshayambara’, a critical exploration of gender and masculinity in Yakshagana with a contemporary feminist lens. ‘Mythology Upon the table’ (Taiwan International Festival of Arts 2019) is an Asian critique of Homer’s ‘Odyssey, I am Not Here’ (Singapore Fringe Festival 2020) is a dance drama exploration of female censorship.

Her Kannada play, ‘Nava’, in collaboration with 9 transwomen from Aravani Art project is currently in production. Sharanya is an INLAKS scholar and member of Lincoln Centre Director’s Lab, New York. She is one of the founders of theatre collective, Dramanon, Bengaluru which produces new writing and nurtures emerging voices.

Rashmi is a theatre director and facilitator. Her work and interest lie at the intersection of Kannada and English theatre as well as that of playback and proscenium. She has an educational background in psychology, which she often uses as a tool in playmaking. She is artistic director of ‘jijji productions’, one of the co-founders of ‘Citylamps Playback Theatre’ and works as a corporate facilitator at ‘Navgati’.

She has directed two plays for the Rangashankara youth festival (‘Kurchigalu’, an absurdist play and ‘Aashi mattu Renu’, a queer love story). She was awarded the Gender Bender grant by Sandbox Collective and Max Muller Bhavan in 2020. She has also performed in over 75 playback and improvisation performances. Her master’s dissertation, explored the psychological biases (in the form of heuristics) people hold against women theatre directors. She is drawn to Gender, Mental health and Absurdism in performance.

Deepika Arwind is a playwright, director and performer, who has worked as a theatre practitioner for the last 14 years. She runs ‘The Lost Post Initiative’, a theatre and performing arts collective that works collaboratively with diverse artists, largely around gender and women on stage. Her work has been presented in many parts of the world including Germany, Austria, USA, France, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Singapore, Dubai and all over India and has won several awards and fellowships for her work. Her current touring productions nationally, internationally (and now digitally) are ‘No Rest in the Kingdom’ (produced by Sandbox Collective) and ‘I am not here’ (supported by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore). Most recently she created ‘Pyaare 2020-ji’, originally created for Serendipity Arts Festival Virtual, and now an independent show. She is the author of ‘Sarayu’, published by Le Cosmographe Éditions, France, in 2018.

When not reluctantly explaining what she does for a living to curious people, Lekha Naidu is either facilitating a class for young theatre enthusiasts or rigging lights or translating plays and other pieces of literature from English to Kannada and vice versa or planning photo shoots while finding ways to get on stage and perform.

Some affectionately call her the Girl Friday of the Arts community, conveniently forgetting about the other days of the week, while she often refers to herself as a theatre practitioner. She has made no significant contribution to the world, yet; but she keeps trying. One of the ways is ‘Avala Hejje’, a social enterprise, of which she is the Creative Director. She has served as a Consultant to the High Powered Committee set up in 2013 by the Ministry of Culture to examine the national level cultural institutions under it.

Recently she has begun utilising all her skills at a community space called Bangalore International Centre.