India’s First Theatre Group of Persons with Special Needs

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The Coloured Zebra: Beyond Black & White, a social impact enterprise for children and young adults with special needs. We aim at imparting the right skill set and training to these individuals for a better and independent living.

William Shakespear very rightly said, “All the World’s a stage and all men and women are merely players.” We truly believe that there is no better way to express oneself than drama and in case of persons with special needs theatre acts like a therapy. Thus, we trained young adults, mostly teenagers on theatre and formed India’s first theatre group of persons with special needs, called – Kalakaar!”. The members undergo an eight months’ production oriented theatre workshop. The first six months are dedicated to theatre therapy to improve speech, dialogue delivery, expressions, body posture, communication and socialization skills, behavior modification, cognitive skills, music and dance movements; the final two months are production oriented. We believe that each individual should get a fair chance, thus, we run a theatre workshop every year and add new members in each production.

Armed with years of experience in the field of special education, we decided to start a pre-vocational and vocational training institute for these individuals to empower them economically and socially. Therapy Through Theatre is a one of its kind program focusing on holistic development of children and young adults with special needs. It is an amalgamation of occupational therapy, speech therapy and behavior modification. The program enhances their communication and socialization skills and also aims at providing them employment in the field of entertainment.

Our first show was in 2017 and till date we have done four shows. The last show was a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on his 150th birth anniversary. The group performed a 40 minutes long musical play depicting Gandhi’s life and Indian Freedom struggle. The show was held at India International Centre, Delhi on June 30, 2019. We will be performing on October 2, 2019 at Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra.

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