Ghoomakkad Toli - A Community Arts Project

For the last couple of months I have been doing a community arts project funded by Khoj at Khirkee village, in New Delhi. The premise for the Ghoomakkad Toli is that people especially children have a fantastic ability and need to make and play out stories. This process helps to construct ideas, reaffirm what we are taught at school, experiment with relationships through the “safe distance” of drama while giving us the power to re-imagine the world and the roles we play in it, as we would like it. Spaces that we play in often direct the theme and nature of our dramatic games. While the games themselves become natural and fun means to make spaces around us come alive.As cityscapes rapidly change and class dominates how children play in or imagine their world the Ghoomakkad Toli has been working with children to create and document their memories of group play. Essentially to make a body of site-specific performance work that acknowledges their surroundings and their relationship with these spaces at a particular time in our lives.

Ghoomakkad Toli has been a really exciting project, with its fair share of challenges (some that I definitely was not expecting). The children who are participating are very enthusiastic and come to the sessions loaded with an energy that is at times hard to keep up with. On certain days it feels like atleast a couple of the kids have been running through an entire session of an hour and a half!! Therefore it isn't surprising that their favorite sessions have actually been the ones where they've had to keep still for the whole time, painting stories about Khirkee that they have made. They want to keep returning to the painting exercises.

We chose the Khirkee Masjid for our performance because it has an aura to it that captivates the imagination of not only the children in the community but the adults too. Most parents don't want their kids going to the masjid to play. The roof of the Masjid does not have high enough railings so they fear that some one is bound to fall off. However obviously, the more the kids are told to not go there the more they insist on playing in the Masjid. Some of the boys absolutely love to chase bats that live within the domes inside. The darkest crevices in the Masjid are their favorite haunts. While outside they play cricket and try all sorts of acrobatics, by climbing the high walls and jumping down from great heights (explaining that it isn't very safe to do that falls on deaf ears!).

So it was natural to build a story around the Khirkee Masjid (that all the kids call खिड्की का किला ). The story was made through a series of story circles where the children added their bits to the story as it went round the circle. घुमक्कड़ टोली की पहली कहानी can give any blockbuster a run for its money! It is set in an unknown past, where two kings battle for supremacy. The king who wins (महरोली का राजा ) is greedy and too full of himself. He's cursed by a seer that his son will destroy him. The king doesn't take the seer seriously. A son is born and grows up to be a fine warrior, in a hurry to ascend the throne. So he does murder his parents and crowns himself king. However the parents begin to haunt the new king, who in turn invites another seer to perform a big "sacrifice" to capture these ghosts...

To know how the story ends come to the Ghoomakkad Toli performance in July. :-)

The most exciting thing that this project has done is broken some of the barriers based on caste/class/ and ethnicity, in the Khirkee community. At least for the children. When we began their were little factions and some kids who refused to hold hands with other kids. They would constantly tell me to get rid of these kids, because they were no good, and would only bring trouble. We continued anyway. However by the third week they'd forgotten about not holding each others' hands. They were even making jokes and laughing together. Now if one of them doesn't show up someone will insist on going to his house to find out what's up with him.

I don't know if at the end of the project the kids will continue to be friends with each other or play with each other. Or whether they will go back into their camps as their parents have taught them to. But I think if even for a few months they have been able to overcome these harsh and unfair barriers built long before their time, they have made a success of the Ghoomakkad Toli!!