Shrikant Navalagiri

Shrikant Navalagiri is a theatre-artist based in Bommanagi, Bagalkot district. He is a graduate from Ranga Shikshana Kendra and an active theatre practitioner. He has been conducting several theatre workshops for children during the summer and Dussehra breaks in schools. His most recent participation in travel shows at Rangayana, Mysore has opened new ways for him to engage in the field of Theatre in Education. In 2017 he started his own organisation Sangama Kala mattu Samskritika Sangha in his village. This project enables him to connect with 51 students from sixth to eighth grade of the Kasturba Girls Residential School, Kadampur, Bagalkot district, to explore the lives of people from villages submerged during the construction of dams in the region.

 

The Upper Krishna Project consists of construction of two dams across the river Krishna. The main storage is at the Almatti dam in Vijayapura district while there is another dam at Narayanpur in Bidar district. This project has been problematic since its beginning. The benefits of the dams mostly go to Kalaburgi, Raichur and Yadgir districts while 177 villages in Bagalkot and Vijayapura have been submerged with 2,28,125 people displaced who are yet to get proper rehabilitation.

This project seeks to listen to the stories of people and of their experiences with regard to the construction and implementation of these dams since its inception to the present date. His project stemmed from questions such as, ‘How do the people perceive the dam?  To what extent can the state curtail the basic rights of a community, while claiming to intervene on behalf of the larger society?  When does building a dam stop being just an infrastructure project and become a tool for exploitation and marginalisation? Do they understand its importance and the environment they live in?’ With these questions Shrikant will attempt to engage students to understand the lived realities of the communities affected by the dams. 

Shrikant with the students will explore artistic processes like visual arts, story-telling, street plays and theatre in understanding the context of constructing the dams. He will also travel, meet the displaced people and record their narratives. By sharing those recorded voices with students Shrikant will encourage them to build stories about the effects of constructing dams. These narratives will finally culminate into radio-plays created by the students. He will draw additional content for the project from the textbooks particularly from social science, geography and language arts. He will also involve the teachers of the school in all his engagements with the students and the community. Shrikant believes that these engagements will encourage the students to enhance their skills in making decisions and managing responsibilities.

 

The outcome of this project will be a series of performances and radio-plays. Shrikant’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be still and video documentation of the project and digital copies of radio-plays.