Anuja Ghosalkar is the founder of Drama Queen—a Documentary theatre company, evolving a unique form of theatre in India since 2015. Her practice focuses on personal histories, archival absences and blurring the hierarchies between audience and performer—to extend the idea of theatre to create audacious work. Iterations around form and process, modes of (social) media, sites, technologies, reclaiming narratives on gender and intimacy are critical to her performance making and pedagogy.

Her performances and workshops have been programmed by University of Oxford, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Sophiensale, Serendipity Arts Festival, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Forum Transregionale —ZMO, among others. Anuja is the co-curator of the international workshop series on Documentary Theatre with Kai Tuchmann—that programmed artists like Gobsquad Collective, Boris Nikitin, Rimini Protokoll, Zhao Chuan. She co-curated VR based performances for the Serendipity Arts Virtual 2020.

As visiting faculty at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology she leads practice based pedagogy. She has written on film and performance for Nang Magazine, Art India Bioscope, and Hakara.

Her recent work The Lonely Hearts Club, started as an instagram handle in March 2020, is now an online show about voyeurism,  relationships with screens and erotica. Her newest live performance premiered at Sophiensale, Berlin in November 2021— I Promise the Bearer frames questions about art, funding and theatre. She is the 2022 research fellow at the archives of the National Centre for Biological Studies.

Kai Tuchmann is a director and dramaturge whose theatre works circle around the very specific relationship that theatre claims with events in the real world. In this context Kai is interested in theatre’s division between spectators and performers—which turns theatre into a paradigmatic site of reality construction. His works engage in particular with the question of how technologies of theatre, ranging from acting techniques to the utilization of new media in performance, contribute to the production of truth claims and reality effects. Kai is developing his approach of theatre in close collaboration with artists from China and India. His stagings and dramaturgies were invited, among others, to I Dance Hong Kong, Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival, Zürcher Theaterspektakel, Kunstfest Weimar, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Wuzhen Theatre Festival, Asia Society New York, and OCAT Shenzhen. Thematically, these works examine, among other things, the afterlife of the Cultural Revolution in present-day China, the effects of urban development on the population of migrant workers, and the application of digital technologies.

Kai studied Directing at Drama Academy Ernst Busch, Berlin. He is a member of Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama – Dramaturgy Faculty, where he develops, together with Li Yinan, the curriculum for the first Dramaturgy program in Asia. He has taught and lectured at Beijing University, University of California Santa Cruz, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi. Currently he is a Fulbright Scholar at The Graduate Center, City University New York. Kai published articles and chapter contributions on dramaturgy and documentary theatre in several books (e.g. for Routledge and the Brecht Yearbook) and he has written for Theatre Times and the German weekly Der Freitag.