CCDC has been associated with the Annasawmy Mudaliar School since 2012. The school is 113 years old, and run by the Annasawmy Mudaliar Trust .

We have offered short workshops for teachers, and more sustained year long workshops for students. The positive feedback from the students led to an invitation to conduct a two- year project in 2017. We worked with students of the 7th grade for two years, that is, till they finished their 8th.

The sustained engagement over two years helped build a close-knit group, and paved the way for deeper exploration into their struggles. Image Theatre became a vehicle for the students to tell their stories visually first, and then create their plays. At the end of the two years, they performed these plays for an invited audience of students and teachers from the school.

The students were amazed at their own creative abilities, and performance skills. They were also blown away by the power of their imagined solutions to the problems in their lives. Playing the roles of people in authority such as teachers and school principal gave them an opportunity to understand these positions at close quarters, and practice skills of negotiation, decision making, and listening.

Here are a few excerpts from their feedback at the end of the two year project:

"In this workshop I learnt that all are equal."

"The agreements is for not just us but for everyone and we need to follow them not only in this workshop but also outside."

"Boys and girls are friends here."

"In other classes we are separate, but here we are united, I like that."

"How we are, we are accepted in this class."

"We performed in front of teachers without feeling scared."

CCDC was engaged in a year long workshop with students of the 7th grade in My School, an affordable private school in Bangalore. The theatre workshops were offered as an elective and 25 students signed up.

The students came from the immediate neighbourhood around the school, and were largely homogeneous in terms of ethnic background. Boys and girls did not mix. It took the group some time to grasp the importance of the workshop agreements to listen, respect everyone, etc. Theatre workshops meant fun- but here they were given charge of their own discipline! Once they experienced the process of collective decision making, they became fully engrossed in the games and exercises and were eager to tell their stories. We ended up creating 2 plays.

One was a play on the occasion of Gandhi Jayanthi. Instead of creating the usual play on Gandhi and his life, Ravi asked the students to think of how they connected with Gandhi and his principles. They created scenes of conflict from their everyday lives and explored themes of non violence and cooperation through their suggested solutions.

At the end of the year, the students created a Forum play depicting a conflict between friends. Over 100 students, teachers, parents, and the school management were seated in the audience and they all connected with the issue. There were several interventions by students, trying out reasoning, keeping the friendship intact, and defusing the tension through love.

One of the students connecting with Ravi after 4 years had this to say about his TO experience: "The workshop changed me a lot. In the workshop I used to be really shy but now, I direct, act in my own youtube videos and work with other actors. Thank you very much for giving me the confidence”.

Department of Journalism, 2019.

CCDC was invited to teach Development Communication to undergraduate students of the Journalism Department. Through TO games and exercises the students explored, through shared personal experiences, how each of them connected to the ideas in Development Communication. At the end of the course, the students wrote reflective pieces on various aspects of Development Communication.

A faculty observer had this to say about the sessions: ''To be frank, initially, I was a little skeptical about how you would be able to link and teach theoretical concepts through theatre but must say I was amazed to see you do that... Your workshops demonstrated again that most learning happens outside and through practical experience than inside ... It was interesting to see all the different voices in class come out. It gave a platform for even those who don't normally engage in class to express themselves, and that was heartening to see ... "

Department of Communicative English, 2016

CCDC offered a TO workshop on the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire for the undergraduate students of Communicative English Department. Through Augusto Boal's games and exercises the students explored themes such as oppression, dialogue, relationships etc.

Here is a feedback from one of the students : ''What you did was teaching, and we learnt so much. This is what a classroom should do ... in the middle of a system that I invest so much time and money trying to learn and grow and become a better person, it can get so frustrating when crappy structures within the system can inhibit learning. This is exactly why your classes came as such hope to me.''

CCDC conducted TO-based workshops for the Department of English. We used TO as a methodology to look at drama texts prescribed as part of the MA course. Using Image Theatre, we explored conflict in Mahesh Dattani's 'Dance like a Man' (2014) and complex relationships in Girish Karnad's 'Nagamandala' (2017).