Discovering Intentionality at Aagaaz

Aagaaz Theatre Trust
6 min readOct 17, 2024

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Blog by Kiana

In Love You?’s rehearsal — exploring love

Stepping into Khwāb Ghar, the aptly named space in Nizamuddin out of which Aagaaz operates, I felt light on my feet. Not so much nimble and elated but instead, easy to topple — out of my depth. Over the past three weeks, I’d been slowly dipping my toes back into the world of theatre, getting my hands on any opportunity I could find to engage with the form after an almost two-year distance from it. This exercise, forging a path with no direction, while somewhat contrary to the tenets of performance I have since learned, has led to some of the most revelatory moments in my adult life.

In April, I was very kindly offered the opportunity to take part in the performance workshop that was being held at Khwāb Ghar for the repertory members, by Rudy, a practitioner and director I’d had the privilege of learning under for a semester at college. I had recently become a fan of the Aagaaz Repertory, too, having seen a performance of Rihla, an exceptional play about the hope and fears of migration, and the connections we make in times of great change, and of great loss — themes that resonated with me strongly at the time of watching. And so, as I walked in and recognised so many of the actors I had marvelled at on stage, as they brought such profound concepts to life, I was also a little intimidated when I realised we would be learning together.

It’s hard, though, in such an open and welcoming space, to be intimidated for long, and the first thing I came to understand, fundamentally about the physical space Khwāb Ghar, and of Aagaaz in general, is that it is a space for learning. There is little sense that the people in a room, participants or facilitators, inherently ‘know better’, or ‘understand more’ than others. Instead, people come in ready to listen, to learn, to share what they have learned over years, and see it play out again in a new space. Looking back some weeks later, I am keen to draw parallels between the workshop, my own goals as a performer, the work I have witnessed and been part of at Aagaaz, and the very idea of community engagement through arts education and practice.

Rudy’s workshop focused on developing purpose in one’s acting practice, perhaps the thing I felt I lacked most strongly — and, for what it’s worth, is not a solid ‘thing’, I have since found. The specifics of what we were learning at the workshop were things I had studied before at university, and I was comforted to be engaging with a language I was familiar with. My muscle memory began to kick in as I was instructed to ‘lead with [my] centre’, and my body started to act on its long-dormant impulses to move and interact with a new geography. To me, this was a reminder of my own history as a performer, a label I had often withheld from myself, a reproach for my perceived lack of commitment to the form in my professional years. But I think such a space is quite powerful in its ability not just to reconnect one with their past, but to render familiar entirely new spaces and experiences, and to arrive at entirely new realisations from familiar actions and exercises.

One of my favourite exercises in this vein is the one where you try inducing yawns. This is a way to counteract inhibition and lean into the sounds and movements our bodies want to make, but we have otherwise taught ourselves to restrict. Having always been a fairly sleepy person, yawning comes quite naturally to me, but is quickly overridden by the social cue — to cover your mouth and stifle the noise. While this is not a practice I’m looking to discard in most public spaces, there is an incomparable sense of freedom in leaning into the action and exploring movement and vocalisation through the body’s impulses. Leading, not with cerebral intention, but instead listening to the intelligence within your body, that tells you where to extend, when to curl inward, how to breathe and relax your voice, to stretch loudly from your throat and the roof of your mouth. Find, from your toes to the crown of your head, not the full range, but the potential of the motion we are capable of as actors.

While the freedom and exhilaration of letting go of inhibition can be consuming, it is important to remember that there are still governing structures in theatre that ground the practice. Abstraction, in and of itself, is easy to render meaningless, and each exercise, no matter how seemingly random, must be rooted in and acted on with a sense of purpose.

First, there must be intention in each action or activity — a reason you are doing it at all. With the yawning, for instance, it’s a matter of releasing inertia, learning how to listen to your body, getting out of your own head, and, more practically — stretching. This intention is achieved most meaningfully by a second guiding principle: commitment. Believing in and following through on each action, wholly aligning yourself with the exercise at hand, and exploring the depths you can achieve with even a simple action. This time, by extending your arm as far as it can go, or releasing your voice from deep inside your belly, letting it find a path to move through you and finally outwards into the space.

As your intentions become manifest, they become necessarily part of a shared space, a space one must be aware of, when yawning or otherwise. It is important to zoom out of yourself, focusing not solely on your own movements, or into a singular point in the space. Instead, we are taught to maintain a ‘soft focus’, prioritising expanding peripheral vision, and gathering constant feedback from each sound, movement, and interaction that occurs around us. Finally, you use this information to react. Learning to respond meaningfully to the actors sharing space with you; are you seeing people struggle to find the space to move? Find ways in which your own stretching can accommodate them. Listen to the resonances, depths, volumes, and registers of the yawns from around you, allow these to inform the sounds you make, and begin a new kind of conversation with the others in the room with you — a dialogue led by the body.

In Timira’s session — exploring body

Intention, commitment, soft focus, and reaction. As we gathered to reflect on our takeaways at the end of the workshop — these words circled around us. I was struck by how deeply they resonated with not just the ways in which we could think about acting, but how we could approach any community pursuit meaningfully. In the weeks since the workshop, I have engaged further with Aagaaz’s initiatives. From a 2-day workshop on power and responsible facilitation led by Timira Gupta; a gorgeous collaboration with the children at the Simurgh Centre, showcasing Afghan writing and artwork, and fostering playful and genuinely inspiring conversations between the children from Basti Hazrat Nizammuddin and Khirkee Extension; and regular meetings with the exceptional members of the Repertory and the Facilitators Collective. During this time, I have seen firsthand how these tenets serve as the basis through which facilitation and community building are approached at Aagaaz.

At Aagaaz, each initiative is considered and intentional, with each member of the team wholly committed to the aims of arriving at a more conscious mode of facilitation and creating more inclusive and accessible spaces through which to explore and critically examine art and performance. There is a constant prioritisation of the wider community, an implicit understanding that arts engagement exists not in a silo, but instead must be approached with the same kind of peripheral vision, or ‘soft focus’ as you would in an acting ensemble. A focus that is constantly aware of the context in which it is being practised, and of course, responding to that environment, a dialogue between not just actor bodies, but individuals and communities.

Perhaps too unsubtle a symbol, but Aagaaz has in many ways been a beginning for me, inspiring me to seek out new experiences, to learn from the environments I engage in, and to reciprocate with conscious effort and openness. Now, the feelings of being intimidated and out of my depth are replaced by something more hopeful: the joy of walking into a room with the awareness that you know nothing, and with the comfort that the people around you will be there as you learn, together. These days, stepping into Khwāb Ghar, the ground feels a little more solid under my feet, the path a little more familiar. I’m yet to find something as concrete as purpose, but I’m getting better at learning how to look.

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Aagaaz Theatre Trust

An arts based organisation dedicated to creating inclusive learning spaces that nurture curiosity and critical thought while creating safe spaces for dialogue.