Making Performance: Processes, Forms and Audiences

Join us for a talk with Maya Krishna Rao, where she will reflect on processes that have shaped her performance practice over the years. She explores the possibilities and challenges of working independently, without a director, and the ways a performer sustains curiosity and inspiration through the process of making theatre.

Drawing on her diverse body of work, the talk will examine how performance takes shape across contexts, spaces and forms. It will be illustrated with video clips from some of Maya’s performances.

We have limited seats available. Register using the link.

About the speaker

Maya Krishna Rao has been making solo theatre for more than thirty years. She is also a teacher working in different capacities, training actors and schoolteachers in the use of drama in the classroom and devising theatre without a director. Trained in Kathakali in her childhood, she has adapted its principles for both her teaching and theatre-making processes for the contemporary stage. She devises performances that range from dance theatre and multi-media to comedy, which she performs in auditoria and activist stages. Her works have travelled all over India and the world. 

Since 2012, Maya has been making performances at short notice — sometimes just a day — around issues of public concern. The themes covered have included sexual harassment, citizens’ right to information and the lynching of religious minorities. She has performed her piece Walk, created in response to the horrific gang rape and eventual tragic death of Jyoti Singh, over a hundred times in different countries. 

In 2010, Maya was a recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Acting. She returned the award in 2015 in response to the Indian government’s indifference to rising intolerance in the country.