Unsung Heroes: Two Bengaluru women moving boundaries for gender, inclusivity through theatre get recognition in Germany

The medal statement said, “Sandbox Collective, through its work, has constantly questioned the concept of identity, inclusiveness, diversity, and even access to the arts, and it is through their arts practice that they come closer to finding meaning to these unanswered questions.”

Over the last 10 years, the two women co-founders of the Sandbox Collective – Nimi Ravindran and Shiva Pathak – have produced high-quality theatre work, created a platform for art that pushes the boundaries of gender norms and sexual identities, and also worked to make theatre more viable as a profession for artists while being more accessible for people.

“We are artists turned art administrators rather than administrators alone and this brings in a different perspective,” Shiva Pathak told the German channel DW in a feature on their work.

Nimi Ravindran, a former journalist and theatre director with over 20 years of theatre experience, and Shiva Pathak a theatre actor and arts manager with 15 years of theatre work teamed up together to form the Sandbox Collective in 2013 – in a now or never attempt at a life in the arts and the slogan “in art we trust” as a driving principle of the collective.

In the last decade, Nimi Ravindran and Shiva Pathak have created one of the foremost platforms in the country for gender and queer art through the Gender Bender Arts Festival, held in Bengaluru since 2015, produced work that questions the boundaries imposed on gender and sexual orientation, and have also shown that life in the arts is hard but possible.

“We decided that we wanted to work in the arts full-time, and we wanted to work not just as artists ourselves but we wanted to create some kind of ecology where working in arts is a little more sustainable – where you don’t have to work in a bank through the week and do rehearsals only on Saturday and Sundays,” says Nimi Ravindran about her plunge in 2013.

“I think we were partially successful because a lot of us started working only in the arts and made some kind of a living. It would not be the equivalent of a corporate job. Till Covid hit us, we had a space, we had salaries, and all the people who worked with us were getting paid reasonably well,” she said.

One of the things Sandbox Collective did to make theatre more viable for artists in Bengaluru was to try and ensure that there were at least 120 shows of a performance in a year instead of the five or ten shows that would occur in the normal course.

“Shiva and I were very clear that we should put our own creative pursuits on the backburner and wait till Sandbox kind of takes off. So, we produced theatre, we produced music, we produced dance, and we produced international shows for India – shows we thought should be seen. We took shows we thought were fantastic abroad,” Nimi Ravindran said.

Sandbox Collective was staging nearly 120 shows at pubs, homes, and the main theatres of Bengaluru until Covid struck in 2019-20. “There is no way you can keep 120 shows happening in a year with three people. It was impossible. We continue to do some shows but not as many as before – we have curated many festivals,” the Sandbox Collective co-founder said.

Sandbox Collective being a women-led theatre production unit, a key focus for Nimi and Shiva was to push the gender boundaries in theatre -producing more work by women writers and plays with prominent roles for women.

One of the shows produced by Sandbox Collective is called No Rest in the Kingdom and is about what it is like to be growing up as a woman in a country like India. “It is contemporary, funny and it was something we were interested in. We performed it everywhere – in houses, auditoriums for 20 people, for 300 people – we did a lot of shows,” Nimi Ravindran said.

The show “was born from the desire to embody and subvert expressions of masculinity through the body of a female performer,” says Sandbox Collective.

The Gender Bender Festival that the collective started in 2015 was also intended to push the boundaries on gender issues in the theatre world. The festival which is held in collaboration with the Goethe Institut offers grants and space for artists to present work on gender, sexuality, and identity. In the first year, as many as 77 artists applied to feature their work at the festival, and in the last two years, there were 200 to 250 applications.

In the first year of the Gender Bender festival, the number of applications surprised the Sandbox Collective co-founders. “We were shocked because the first call went out and we thought there would be some 10 applications but we got some 70 applications. This made us realise there were many artists wanting to work on the themes of gender,” Shiva Pathak told DW

“Gender Bender may have come to be recognised as a queer arts festival but it is a feminist festival – which means it is inclusive of anybody who is not included in other spaces. We are a bunch of women and it is important for us to say it is also a women-led festival,” Nimi said.

The performance that Sandbox Collective took to Germany when they received the Goethe Medal last year was a show called Queensize, written by the choreographer Mandeep Rakhty which was produced in 2015 by Sandbox Collective during the protests against the criminalisation of homosexuality in India through the Indian Penal Code’s Section 377.

“Queensize is a choreographic exploration that takes the form of a detailed study of the intimacy between two men. Played out on a charpoy, Queensize makes an embodied argument for the fundamental right to love by examining the nuts and bolts of a close encounter between two male bodies,” says the Sandbox Collective description of the show.

“At that time section 377 was still criminalised. We immediately had the question of where would we perform, would it be in small towns or in big places? At that time it was a performance of protest,” says Nimi Ravindran.

“We feel queer rights are human rights – all rights are human rights. I think in spaces like this you align with anyone who is marginalised. We took Queensize to small towns – we think these things are not spoken about in small towns – but there were several people in the audience who came out and there was a need to create a support circle for that. The law changed in 2018 and we do not perform it as much as before,” says Nimi Ravindran.

“The law has changed but mindsets don’t change so we continue to perform it,” she said.

The Sandbox Collective co-founders were accused in a case of promoting enmity between communities in 2019 when they produced a performance by the band Dastaan Live for an arts festival in Goa.

A case was filed against the band and the producers over a song with lyrics from an old poem by a renowned Hindi poet after right-wing activists raised objections. It was eventually quashed.

“The thing is that we do not know what can create a conflict. In my show, I may have the name of a God and I may be a house help and you wonder whether this would cause trouble and you start a process of self-censoring. If we start thinking about these small petty things then are we really able to say the things that we need to say?” Nimi Ravindran asked.

“Today asking questions is being seen as wrong. Earlier, if you asked questions or criticised the government, it did not mean you were opposed to the country – you could do it, today, it is made to seem that you are against the country. If you do not like a movie and you spell it out, then it is made to seem like you do not love your country. It feels strange. Nobody knows what can cause problems. Hurting religious sentiments is quite arbitrary,” she said.

“What does it take to live in a country where the cops say freedom of expression is a fundamental right and somebody’s fear that they may be hurt is not a fundamental right – so we will protect you against them, go ahead and perform and we will see what we can do. We have a very clear right, a fundamental right to speech and expression and upholding that should be above everything else,” said the co-founder.