Message for the World Puppetry Day
By Ranjana Pandey
The Sea
The Sea always carried storytellers and their stories from one shore to another,
from one island to the next, from one continent to many. The stories swirled
together, marinated in many cultural stews and became magical and immortal.
It is the stuff of stories since the beginning of time, full of sea dragons,
mermaids and many fantastical creatures.
It is through these waterways that princesses and pirates, sailors and traders
took trousseaus of wealth, entourage of craftsmen, court jesters and exotic
produce and, of course, the great mythologies like Mahabharat, Ramayan,
Sagar Manthan, Sindbad the Sailor, Journey to the West, One Thousand and
One Nights...as they travelled from one culture to the next.
The stories changed with each telling, gathering subtle layers over centuries.
Entertaining, distracting, feeding the souls of travellers, adventurers, villains
and heroes from distant unfamiliar lands.
The Sea remains magical and mysterious, touching the lives of millions on this
planet. It feeds, sustains, and inhabits the imagination of all. The Ocean is the
force from which all life on this planet emerged.
But today’s reality is poignant. The sea is our last frontier today – the last
frontier between us and annihilation of life as we know it. Today the sea is
polluted, gasping for life, strangled by nets of greed and neglectful waste. It has
been reduced to a garbage filled soup of dying corals and marine life. Each one
of us is in some little way is part of this sad reality.
Here then is a challenge to all of the story tellers of today to revive the respect
for the Seas of Earth – our only home.
Let us put our collective talent to the task. Right Now!
Ranjana Pandey
Indian puppeteer, playwright, theatre and television
director, and educator. Ranjana Pandey graduated from
Delhi University in English Literature, with an MA in Mass
Communication and a Diploma in Journalism. She trained in
puppetry in Belgium under Theatre Toone, Theatre Tilapin,
and Théâtre Royal du Peruchet.
In 1982, Ranjana Pandey founded and directed Jan Madhyam
(“the people’s medium” or “of the people”), a community
media-based, educational puppetry company. Ranjana
Pandey is one of the pioneers in the Indian subcontinent to
explore puppetry as therapy.
Jan Madhyam created a puppetry-based weekly “Chowkoo-Pili” (Chowkoo or
“cube-headed” boy and Pili or “yellow” girl) series of shows (1984-1990) for
Delhi’s intellectually disabled youth, which taught learning concepts and
developed social skills and values, performed with partners including Karen
Smith and Shubha Saxena. These weekly shows were taken to schools, slums,
and villages in the Greater Delhi and Haryana region. This work has continued
to improve the lives of the disabled, with special attention to girls and women.
Other development communication programmes using puppetry and
performance media have focused on literacy, the needs of the disabled,
ecology, endangered species, income generation, sanitation, health, and
violence against women.
In 2000-2002, Ranjana Pandey created and directed the first puppetry-based,
18-episode television series for children, Khullum Khulla (Free and Open),
which was telecast by India’s national broadcasting corporation, Doordarshan,
several times through a period of eighteen months.
Ranjana Pandey is on the faculty of several teacher training and mass
communication colleges including Jamia Millia Islamia (National Islamic)
University in New Delhi and she gives workshops on puppetry for education,
therapy and development.
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