APRIL 2024                                                 WORKSHOP 9

We proceeded the next day with theatre of the opporessed facilitation from Neethu and Sheetal. The participants enacted Image theatre, where they formed vignetees or frozen images of their conflicts.

Then the participants were divided into groups and presented mini-plays about their issues, completely scripted and enacted by themselves. The conflicts covered were, Trafficking, Police harassment, Rent and water scarcity. 

At the end of each performance, a forum was conducted with facilitated dialogue from the sex workers about how to handle these conflicts, and everyone had a deeper understanding and empathy of all the sides of a conflict, and a renewed understanding and awareness.

Haan Hum had turned a corner with this session, into a forum, a community equipped to self-liberate.

The last day of our workshop was reinforcing the concepts of light and shadows of conflict, through art.

Anil facilitated a wonderful clay session where participants were asked to make clay sculptures of their ongoing conflicts, and place them in a bowl.

Girija and Anil facilitated a Cyanotype workshop, where light was used to color a chemical on a photosensitive paper, and the shadows get illuminated as a negative space artwork.

Neethu facilitated a wonderful discussion on conflicts, with real life examples, and participants were fully involved in solving the conflict together, and even if there was no end in sight, there was wonderful acknowledgement and understanding of conflict and cohabiting with conflict and accepting all possible solutions as a community.

We also had 4 new participants this time, and they were wonderfully inducted into the larger participant group seamlessly, due to the foundation our old-timers had received over our previous workshops and meetings.