T.I.E. is a residential, 24-hour, intensive experience during which participants will be: introduced to aesthetics of Immersive Theatre, guided through a practical exploration of these strategies, and mentored in the creation of an immersive, theatrical experience about a social justice issue -- a piece that can be shared at the end of the workshop with an invited audience of their choice
The Voice of Dissent
“I am not here to entertain you; I am here to disturb you. Those who are here for entertainment, I request them, please go.” It’s unusual, if not rare, for a live performer to begin by saying that to the audience. The compact of patronage that’s implicit is what Sambhaji Bhagat smashes right at the onset of his performance. For him, this art is a quest for the truth that will liberate the people he represents.
From 1998 to 2004, pro-democracy activist Htein Lin was jailed for challenging the military dictatorship in his home country of Myanmar (formerly Burma) in Southeast Asia. Prior to his imprisonment, Lin acted in films and with a theater troupe. While behind bars, he continued to organize performance artworks with his fellow prisoners.
A social experiment testing the public’s reaction to gay people in China has gone viral.
The blindfolded activists stood in public wearing T-shirts that said “I’m gay would you hug me?” and video of the protest then spread rapidly on Weibo, a hugely popular social media platform in China.
The social experiment follows a recent announcement by Weibo to ban gay content on its platform of 400 million active users.
"Thousands of people, some wearing funeral shrouds, staged demonstrations at the site of the Rana Plaza factory complex on Thursday on the one-year anniversary of the Bangladesh disaster that claimed 1,138 lives.
Cartoons Against Corruption is a cartoon based campaign by political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi to support anti corruption movement in India, best known for sharp hard hitting anti corruption cartoons. Using national emblems and current political news, Trivedi creates cartoons that don't attempt to skirt the issues at hand, but portrays his political stance straightforwardly.
The Kiss of Love campaign in India is a non violent protest against moral policing. It started out as a Facebook page but gained momentum across India when a mob of conservative, right-wing party members attacked and demolished a coffee shop in Kozhikode, Kerala. Their grounds to do so was public display of affection by couples inside the coffee shop, which they saw as immoral activity.
India Ink [Blog]
The New York Times Global Edition
April 4, 2012
By Neha Thirani
The women of Gurgaon, angered by the recent incidents of violent crimes against women in the outsourcing boom town, are calling for a “Girlcott.”
ipaidabribe.com is an online tool that allows the users to report when they pay bribes, are asked to pay and refuse, and when they find an honest officer.
They have a well designed site with apps for mobile phones, and although it started in India it has now grown and you can select multiple countries on different continents.
Zubair Magray, who goes by the stage name Haze Kay, raps about the conflict in Indian-administered Kashmir. The 23-year-old, one of the first rappers to emerge from the valley, blames the Indian military for "ruining" his homeland.
A new, three-minute ad by Coca-Cola, "Small World Machines," starts with a relatively straightforward premise: India and Pakistan do not get along so well. It ends with the promise of peace: "Togetherness, humanity, this is what we all want, more and more exchange," a woman, either Indian or Pakistani, narrates as the music swells. Sounds great. How do we get there? By buying Coke, of course.
For FX Harsono, art is activism. Over the past four decades, performance, sculpture, and painting have become his means of nonviolent protest against government autocracy and ethnic strife in Indonesia.
In the country formerly known as Burma, these free thinkers are a force in the struggle for democracy.
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Adam Dean
Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011
Under the moniker BomBaebs, Pankhuri Awasthi and Uppekha Jain rap about rape, cultural stereotypes, religious biases, and hypocrisy surrounding sexism and gender biases in India. They open the video with a disclaimer, warning that “This video doesn’t have any explicit or bannable content. It is just that the reality for women in India is Explicit.”
Following the huge turnout of Bersih 2.0 in 2011, Bersih 3.0
returned on April 28 with renewed vigour and determination to make the
voices of Malaysians heard. Meaning ‘clean’ in Malay, Bersih calls for
clean and fair elections in a country fed up with problems of electoral
Hok Kolorob. Let there be noise.
It was perhaps these two words of protest that eventually led to the arrest of two engineering students for allegedly molesting a fellow student at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University last month.
On April 24, 2013, more than 1,000 lives were taken in the Rana Plaza Collapse. While history remembers this tragic event as the deadliest garment factory accident, activist and photographer Taslima Akhter reveals a story of dreams crushed by structural murder. Dedicating her career to the lives and struggles of garment workers in Bangladesh, she has continued to foster a community rallying together for safer working conditions.
Global corporation Unilever dumped toxic and contaminated waste behind its thermometer factory located in Kodaikanal, a city in the South Indian state Tamil Nadu. In 2001, once word spread about this breach in environmental precautions, Unilever closed its factory. However, it is yet to adequately compensate its workers, many of whom suffered mercury poisoning. The corporation has also yet to clean up its mess and remediate the land.
With World Comics India, the organization he started, Sharad has pioneered a cheap and easy medium for poor people to communicate meaningfully on issues that are neglected by the conventional media. While the urban elite dominates public media, the grinding day-to-day concerns of millions are rarely heard. Layers of discrimination and abuse heaped on huge numbers of people keep their problems out of sight and out of mind.
Since November 2020, tens of thousands of farmers have been living in tents at sprawling camps pitched on highways outside the capital New Delhi.
Large barricades erected by the police and topped with barbed wire stand a few hundred meters from the camp, preventing the farmers from encroaching any closer to the center of Delhi. At times, violence has broken out during demonstrations.
As climate change worsens, so will our collective sense of loss. Coastlines, cities, crops, and entire species will disappear. Artist Catherine Young has created a perfume line that bottles up the scents of things we enjoy today, but will be diminished–or gone–soon enough. During exhibitions, visitors are allowed to smell the perfumes.