Their first production, “NAZAR KE SAMANE”// Before your Eyes’ journeys between childhood, youth and adulthood. Filled with unfulfilled desires, confessions, secrets and dreams, the actors provoke questions around identity, freedom and justice. Nazar ke Samne is woven from personal experiences, listening closely to the body to reveal beauty and violence in everyday life. Given their lived experience of caste discrimination and various forms of violence, their theater making practice aims to create a space of dignity, freedom and self representation for women from marginalized communities.The performance has travelled across Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Hyderabad, completing over 50 shows.

ABOUT - FREEDA THEATRE

Freeda Theatre is an inter-generational collective of women from Scheduled Caste and Tribe communities, in Madhya Pradesh, India. Having grown up in deeply feudal and patriarchal contexts, the women have endured caste based discrimination, economic exploitation and sexual violence. The fight for justice, within the legal system, and in their communities has been difficult given prevailing casteism and moralities. In the aftermath of violence, the body becomes a site of shame, and the survivor finds her identity limited to the act of violence alone. In these conditions, the women of Freeda turned to theater as a medium of catharsis, healing and self representation. Theatre enabled them to reconnect with their bodies in the aftermath of violence, and gave them the courage to articulate and express their dreams, aspirations and struggles. Negotiating and resisting forms of backlash, from family and community, the women have fought to move beyond the framework of being ‘survivors’ to reinvent themselves through theater. As they often say, it was from the stage that they feel they have finally received ‘justice. The group is unique as it is one of the few that is led by survivors of violence from Rural India.

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