Kaivalya Plays

25/09/2026

Workshop Three of Baba Quijote Singh took place on Saturday at Instituto Cervantes Nueva Delhi.

The session moved the project into the body and the voice. Almost nobody in the room was a singer, and for many it was the first time singing in front of anyone. It is a genuinely vulnerable thing to ask of people who met each other an hour earlier, and the afternoon was built around earning that rather than assuming it.

Mansi Multani led the singing and took time before asking for a song at all: letting people find their own voices, find each other, and learn that nothing in the room was going to be judged. What that produced was not a performance. It was a room of strangers singing one line together and not wanting to stop.

These sessions are free and the call is open. Access to a facilitator of Mansi’s calibre should not depend on what you can pay for, and the work is better for a room that holds twenty-year practitioners alongside people who have never performed.

Saturday also gave us the first live test of the projection work, running behind the singing.

Baba Quijote Singh, a Punjabi reframing of Cervantes, opens at Instituto Cervantes Nueva Delhi on 8 December 2026 and runs to 31 January 2027. Live performance, projection-mapped installation, audio archive and chapbook. The installation is free to visit.

With Mansi Multani, Varoon P. Anand, Riddhijit Chattopadhyay and Gaurav Singh Nijjer, and with thanks to Krishna Kohli and the team at the Instituto Cervantes auditorium.

Presented by Kaivalya Plays, with Instituto Cervantes Nueva Delhi and the Embassy of Spain in India, as part of Año Dual España India 2026.

12/09/2026

Improv and Storytelling for AVP and VP level professionals at Axis Bank.

This room took longer to open up, and that is worth saying out loud.

Getting senior people on their feet, face to face, improvising in front of peers who know their reporting lines, is harder than it looks. It asks for vulnerability, and vulnerability is not a word most people connect to productivity.

So we demonstrate the connection rather than argue for it.

When someone offers an idea and the first response is critique, you have not filtered the idea. You have trained the person. The next time they are given the floor, they will say less. Do that across a team and you lose the ideas you never hear.

The alternative is simple. Create the safety for ideas to arrive unjudged, and let them build on each other. Listen, acknowledge, add. You are not committing to every suggestion. You are letting enough of them exist that a workable one emerges. Selection comes later, and it comes faster, because there is something to select from.

We also give real time to mental health, and we keep it practical. Three minutes is enough to check in on someone, to ask for help yourself, and to respond to a colleague’s struggle without stigmatising it. Most people are not unwilling. They have just never been shown what those three minutes look like.

Improv is not the icebreaker before the real training. It is the training.

Facilitated by Varoon P. Anand and Gaurav Singh Nijjer, delivered to Axis Bank.

06/09/2026

Two and a half kilometres. Two hours.

Before Tariq Ahmed was interviewed, he was already one of us. He joined Kaivalya Plays with no performance background, became a theatre artist here, and travelled with us to the Teatro Clásico festival in Almagro, the only Indian team ever to play there.

When we asked him, for Raum / Raah, whether he had ever been afraid in public space, we were not collecting material. We were listening to someone we love.

When the Delhi riots began, “I was with my artistic director Varoon in Cervantes.” Varoon offered him a ride home, Tariq refused. He called home.

The police cordon stopped the auto.

“I sent my location to my dad, and I started walking. I would follow the Google Map, but whenever I will see violence in front of me, I will change the direction and it will have to reroute.”

Every reroute appeared on his father’s phone. He passed burning shops and men stopping people to ask their names, “so that names would give away their religion.” It took him 2 hours to make it home.

The first run we did his monologue via live camera with Naman, Sadgi and Shiv watching for safety. The final we pre-recorded, leaving it with no live body and no context. So Varoon asked Riddhijit Chattopadhyay to stand holding a blank white placard, and projected the text onto it.

Riddhijit: “Initially I didn’t understand what was happening, because I had to stand in the right position to capture the subtitles. But later the details become very consequential. Somebody standing with a placard, a very important image even in the past few months.”

A person standing alone with a placard and yet representing an image of quiet resistance.

Soon after the riots, Tariq moved to a village outside Ayodhya. He teaches there. He still teaches Spanish, for free. He still writes poetry.

We asked what public space is for. Tariq said “If the society is like a home, then public space is the hall, the living room.”

He said that about the same streets he had to reroute through.

For Tariq. More soon.

RAUM / RAAH

A coproduction of Kaivalya Plays and fringe ensemble, awarded the International Coproduction Fund of Goethe Institut. Research supported by ifa.

05/09/2026

🌾 More from Landscapes of La Mancha and Punjab

Baba Quijote Singh is an immersive production built on projection, and a session on visual adaptation could reasonably have gone straight to the tools. We wanted something else. We wanted help thinking the adaptation through, so we put newspapers on the table and asked the room to work the problem with us.

Nothing serious, everything important. Kaivalya Plays came up through improv, and the question under every game we have played is the same one: how does a room become a place where somebody who did not plan to speak finds they want to. We usually answer that with play. Here we answered it with scissors, and it worked the same way. Within an hour participants were explaining why this face had to become a horse, why the field runs in that direction, what the figure at the edge is walking away from. By the end we were listening to voices we had not heard at the start.

They made it together. Everyone had arrived among strangers, and by the afternoon they were four to a table, negotiating a single image, arguing about where the horizon should sit. Watching people who met three hours earlier build something jointly and defend it jointly was the part of the day that stayed with us longest.

The newspaper was the surprise. Nobody expected the pile of old papers to be the thing everyone gravitated to, or that Tupac would find his way into a Punjabi landscape by the end of it.

Collage was the honest form for what this production is doing. La Mancha and Punjab do not dissolve into each other here. They are held together with visible seams, one torn edge against another, both worlds still legible in the join. That is the whole method of Baba Quijote Singh, sitting on a table in New Delhi in a stack of last week’s papers.

Four hours went quickly. By the end we all had the feeling that the work had only just started.

Thank you to Gaurav Singh Nijjer for leading the session, and to everyone who stayed until the last cut.

Photos Riddhijit Chattopadhyay Varoon P Anand

Presented by Kaivalya Plays, with the support of Instituto Cervantes Nueva Delhi and the Embassy of Spain in India, as part of Año Dual España–India 2026.

01/09/2026

🎭 BECOMING BABA QUIJOTE

What happens when a Punjabi farmer decides he is a knight? How does his body change? How does he speak? And what happens when the language of chivalric romance meets Punjabi speech, song and everyday life?

The third Baba Quijote Singh workshop, Becoming Baba Quijote, led by Varoon P. Anand and Riddhijit Chattopadhyay, moves from the visual world of the previous workshop into the body and voice.

Participants will explore the central figure of the production: an old Punjabi farmer who begins to see himself as a knight through physical theatre, movement, voice and multilingual choral speaking.

We will experiment with how character can emerge through posture, rhythm, gesture and vocal texture, while bringing Spanish romance into dialogue with Punjabi boliyan. Together, we will begin building the chorus of voices that surrounds Baba Quijote Singh and ask: is he imagining a new world, or is he simply seeing the world differently?

🎭 BECOMING BABA QUIJOTE
Saturday, 19 September 2026 | 2:00–6:00 PM
📍 Instituto Cervantes New Delhi

No prior theatre experience required.

18+ (or 16+ with parental consent) | Limited places

Register now at www.kaivalyaplays.org or follow the link in our bio.

Presented by Kaivalya Plays, with support from Instituto Cervantes New Delhi and the Embassy of Spain in India, as part of Año Dual España–India 2026.

31/08/2026

🌾 From La Mancha to Punjab, the landscape through images

The second Baba Quijote Singh workshop, Landscapes of La Mancha and Punjab, led by Gaurav Singh Nijjer, explored what happens when a story moves from text into image.

We began by asking: what makes an image tell a story? Participants explored the grammar of a frame… looking at composition, perspective, space, objects, bodies, costumes, colour and visual relationships, and how these choices shape what we see and how we understand a scene.

We then looked at visual adaptation: how can the same story become something completely different while still remaining recognisable? Through examples of Don Quijote across film, theatre and visual arts, we examined how artists have interpreted Cervantes differently across mediums, periods and contexts.

From there, participants worked with scenes from Don Quijote, breaking them down into their essential elements, like setting, objects, characters, costumes, dialogue and themes, before asking how these could be translated into a Punjabi visual world.

Through visual storytelling exercises and collage-making, La Mancha and Punjab began to collide, overlap and transform. Participants experimented with contrast and juxtaposition, creating their own visual adaptations of Cervantes’ world.

Join us for the next workshop in the project:

🎭 BECOMING BABA QUIJOTE
Saturday, 19 September 2026 | 2:00–6:00 PM
📍 Instituto Cervantes New Delhi

How does a man who has spent his life bent over a field carry himself once he decides he is a knight? In the third Baba Quijote Singh workshop, participants will work with physical theatre, voice and multilingual choral speaking to discover the central figure of the production: an old Punjabi farmer who begins to see himself as a knight.

No prior theatre experience is required.

18+ (or 16+ with consent) | Limited places

Register now at www.kaivalyaplays.org or follow the link in our bio.

Presented by Kaivalya Plays, with the support of Instituto Cervantes New Delhi and the Embassy of Spain in India, as part of Año Dual España–India 2026.

30/08/2026

A confession, and a thank you.

The hacky sacks we use at the beginning of all of our work began with a handful we bought in Spain’s legendary El Rastro in 2019. We have given so many away since then that we eventually asked Aakash Gupta to pick some up for us on his last US tour. When he came back with them, he refused to take payment, so we decided to pose for a donation photo instead
Playing with those hacky sacks at yesterday’s workshop got us thinking about how far back Aakash goes with us.

He did not clear his first audition with us, in 2013. The following year he was the lead in Ooops, which still holds our record for the most tickets sold in a single day at Stein Auditorium, and that same May, he did his first stand-up set at Akshara, same place he did first improv show. He was a founding member of CueLess Improv and performed with us across the city, including some of the shadiest rooms Delhi has to offer. He worked backstage at Kamani for Noises Off and Hamlet the Clown Prince, and years later filled that same room with West Delhi Massive, where Varoon got to perform improv alongside him. He took a clowning show to a hundred performances across Delhi. And whenever he is in Delhi, he still turns up to train improv.

Through all of it, he has done nothing but work hard and have our backs.

Tonight he performs at the New York Comedy Club in the East Village. All the very best, Aakash! We’ll see you in the improv room when you’re back.

25/08/2026

“Who does public space belong to?”

We asked it early. The answer got complicated immediately. Class, money, who is allowed to simply stand somewhere without a reason. But gender kept stepping in front of everything else. With every woman we spoke to in Delhi, safety was inescapable.

fringe ensemble builds work from real interviews. One of our first, at Jantar Mantar in 2024, was with aPurpleHeart (aPH), theatre practitioner and Inlaks awardee, in Delhi for the second time. We asked how the city changed how she behaved. Nine minutes on how a space alters her body, her voice, how much attention she has to spend.

April 2024. Instituto Cervantes New Delhi gave us two days in their auditorium to test ideas. We were compiling interviews and footage from the week before. Purple’s interview got us all talking but we weren’t sure how to stage yet. We were projecting POV footage from a night walk through Pahar Ganj. Out of nowhere, Varoon asked Shivani, a medical student and dancer who happened to be in the room that day and had never performed in her life, to stand in front of it.

The team’s discomfort was instant. She was in an auditorium, not on that street, but suddenly all of us became cautious and protective. The contrast in the footage immediately stood out. Almost everyone occupying public space was a man.

We asked her to walk as if she were on that street. Then Varoon asked what she would do if she felt completely free. She began to dance. Ramita Menon, an experienced core performer with Kaivalya Plays, walked in and joined her.

Varoon: “Recognising new talent isn’t just about working with people who ask. Not everyone can say it out loud. Shivani kept showing up to spaces where we were working, so I asked her. I’m grateful she said yes, because the moment she did the play came alive in front of us.”

Two years, workshops, and a second country later, Shivani became the lead performer of Raum/Raah. Supported in the workshop process by the incredible contributions of Nikita Bharti, Sadgi, and Ramita in Delhi, with Bettina Marugg holding the same ground in Bonn.

Our gratitude to Instituto Cervantes, Mool and Niv Art Centre
Photos by Varoon P Anand and Shiv Jha-Mathur

21/08/2026

Improv is not the icebreaker before the real training. It is the training.

“The Dutch expect you to have an opinion and to share it.” A participant said that to us at the Netherlands Embassy in New Delhi, and it has stayed with us since. Last week we were back for our fourth workshop with them, third in under a year. Ninety minutes, hard stop, a team of eight.

Ninety minutes to work on how a Dutch-Indian team gives feedback, decides things, and disagrees.
Every scene in improv runs on one instruction: make your partner look good. Your job is never your own line. It is the other person.

Which is counterintuitive, because the most effective way to handle your own fear on stage turns out to be taking responsibility for someone else’s. Harder still is trusting that they are doing the same for you, that while you are looking after them, they are looking after you. You cannot instruct that. You can only build a room where it keeps happening until people believe it.

Facilitated by Varoon P. Anand and Gaurav Singh Nijjer. Documented by Riddhijit Chattopadhyay. For the Netherlands Embassy in India.

18/08/2026