Queerprov, An Improv Jam

Kaivalya Plays, in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes Nueva Delhi presents

QUEERPROV

An improv jam for the LTBTQ+ community, women and everyone interested in creating a safe space for queer stories to come together for an afternoon of fun, interactive activities in a safe space.

Facilitated by Shruti Garg and Rakshita Goel

🎟️ Free entry, with prior registration. Register at bit.ly/queerprov30

🗓️ Sunday 30 June, 11am to 1pm

📍 Instituto Cervantes Nueva Delhi, 48 Hanuman Road

🗣️ For members of LGBTQ+ community, women and anyone interested in contributing to this safe space

About The Event

In this world of heteronormative stories and humour, we invite you to a sensitively held, yet playful safe space where members of the LGBTQ+ community and women can unleash their imagination, give colour to their creativity and craft stories using improvisational theatre! The jam will be conducted through a series of interactive game and activities that invite the participants to create stories together. No prior knowledge or preparation is needed, you just need to show up! Participants will be guided through each activity by the facilitators. This jam is open to everyone who wish to contribute to this safe space.

About Your Facilitators

Rakshita (She/Her) and Shruti (They/She) are two friends, drama therapists, and improvisers! While Shruti is a queer standup comedian, Rakshita is a feminist and a committed ally. They combine their skills of being a therapist and an artist to bring their empathy, childhood trauma, dark humour, punch up comedy and quirkiness to the space of improv theatre. They say “enough of Raj-Simran love stories, it’s time for some Tina-Anjali romance” and promise to do better than Bollywood!

About Kaivalya Plays

Kaivalya Plays is a performing arts and production company led by Varoon P. Anand as its Artistic Director and Gaurav Singh Nijjer as its General Manager. Since 2012, they have worked consistently, been very noisy, and built transcultural associations across India and the world. Their artistic work includes original, devised theatre performances which are multilingual, interactive and hybrid, use technology and media on stage as well as are built using techniques of improvisational, documentary and physical theatre. Their work includes live performances, education and training, community arts programs, producing guest performances, and more. Improvisational theatre is the cornerstone of Kaivalya’s artistic practice, which they apply to arts programs focused on artistic development, language learning, mental health and wellbeing, gender and representation, and multicultural performances, among other areas. They have received multiple artistic commissions and grants, such as EU MediaFutures Artist for Media grant, Goethe Institut’s Refunction and Gender Bender grants, amongst others. Their recent artistic work includes ABSURDO (2023), Mining Hate (2023), Ollantay (2022), Lifeline 99 99 (2021), Luz Negra (2020) How To Disappear Completely and Never be Found (2020), Unravel (2019), amongst others. Most recently, they received the Creativity Pioneers Fund 2023 from the Moleskine Foundation.

ABOUT INSTITUTO CERVANTES NUEVA DELHI

The Instituto Cervantes is a public institution founded in 1991 by the Government of Spain, with the aim of promoting Spanish language teaching, and fostering knowledge of Spanish and Hispanic American culture. Currently, the Institute has 78 centers located in 44 countries. Its main headquarters are in Madrid and in Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes. The Instituto Cervantes opened its doors in New Delhi in 2007 and since then thousands of students have learnt Spanish at its facilities, in person, as well as through videoconferences. Likewise, it has been an important space in the social and cultural life of New Delhi, offering  a wide variety of exhibitions, concerts, talks, films, etc. ​ The center also has one of the main Spanish libraries in the city, the Juan Ramón Jiménez Library, which offers a wide collection of literature, audiovisual material and films in Spanish. In addition, it has a resource center for learning and teaching Spanish as a second language.