The seeds of d.r.i.f.t were sown in early 2011 when Niranjani Iyer, the artistic director of The Pocket Company gave her first theatre workshop to the children of the Tibetan Childrens Village school. The project however, only took off properly after our first annual theatre festival in 2017. The desire to work towards creating a sustainable community theatre space outside urban areas is what pushes this project.

In 2019, d.r.i.f.t became a a Trust and thanks to the many individuals who “drifted” in to join us. We are now a motley crew of wildly diverse people, most of whom started off with zero theatre experience but are now ardent theatre enthusiasts and practitioners. We work together to create and organise performances, free school workshops, workshops for adults and children (outside of school) as well as regularly performing public readings on various themes in cafés and restaurants in Mcleodganj and Dharamshala.

Our initiative is built around the ideas of resistance, resilience and community. It is our firm belief that, through the act of working together towards a collective vision, theatre is intrinsically conducive to building solidarity between different people.

TEAM (in alphabetical order)

Anant Dayal

Anant, over the years has worked in theatre, music, visual design and performance education. Lately, he has begun stirring ingredients from each of these together: the resulting concoction being his own recipe for musical storytelling. Currently he divides time between Dharamshala and Delhi. He is famous for his hot toddy.

Gurleen Arora

Gurleen moved from big city Bombay to beauteous Dharamshala in 2013 and has since been involved in teaching fashion, raising animal babies, working in social media, creating a greenhouse and most importantly helping bringing together people in Dharamshala to enjoy and participate in theatre. Gurleen manages our d.r.i.f.t Reads programme. She loves getting people together, for plays and parties.

Laurent Bieche

Laurent is a school teacher who loves theatre.
If he were not there, no one would do our accounts.

Niranjani Iyer

Niranjani directs, acts, dances, choreographs, and teaches theatre. She studied at the Sorbonne University and the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. For the past 5 years, her main focus has been d.r.i.f.t. She hopes to do all the other things she used to do, soon.

Pallavi

Pallavi is a documentary filmmaker / photographer and gender, heritage walk curator. She's the person behind most of our videos. She also moonlights as an English to Hindi translator for d.r.i.f.t plays.

Pratham Jain

Pratham is an idiot theatre enthusiast who willingly moved out from the beautiful and majestic mountains to the rush hour traffic of a metro, though he is sane enough to keep his roots where they belong. He has worked with NGOs for the last 6 years because seriously what corporate would hire him? Pratham loves South America.

Prakram Gurung

Prakram Gurung is a Dharamshala boy. A marine engineer working for a Japanese company. When he’s not travelling the seas, he’s helping create green spaces and loves writing for theatre, performing and reading for dharamshala audiences. He's our go-to person for installing the festival banner, which requires precariously climbing onto the roof.

Sanya Jain

Sanya is our school coordinator for the d.r.i.f.t Schools programme, She likes to have fun with the kids, to listen to their stories and to help them share these stories with a wider audience through theatre. She is an ace production person and her creativity as a graphic designer is responsible for a lot of our posters. She also makes very good tea and pakoras.