The Whilst Walking Tour India

The Whilst Walking Theatre Festival brought a national tour across India, encompassing performances, theatrical experiments, and workshops. The work drew on the performers' contemporary European training alongside personal narrative and myth, placing a seven-person collective before Indian audiences for the first time.

Central to the tour was an investigation of the physical ensemble — the body as a shared instrument of meaning-making. The company sought connections between their own movement-based practice and the organic, historical, and ritual performance traditions they encountered, probing what theatre communicates when language and cultural context shift.

Working in an unfamiliar context transformed the showcase into an intercultural dialogue. Audience responses and critical feedback across each city actively shaped the work as the tour progressed, sharpening the company's thinking about the conditions and function of live performance.

Alongside performances, the festival offered workshops in which the collective opened its devising process to emerging and mid-career artists across India. These sessions were exchanges in both directions: participants brought their own performance vocabularies, and those encounters fed directly back into the evolving work.

Curated and facilitated by Niall Fallon, Titas Dutta, Ainhoa Hevia Uria, Matteo Carpi, Julia Vandehof, Gina Battle Oliva, and Vivek Kumar.

Tour venues:

• Tifa Working Studios — Pune

• United Arts Foundation — Bangalore

• Padatik — Kolkata

• UP 80 — Agra

• Delhi (venue TBC)

• Castiko — Mumbai