Concept Note
Carnival Of Pedagogy: Theatre And Street
The International Festival of Theatre Schools (IFTS) 2027 imagines the city not merely as a venue, but as a living pedagogy. Under the theme “Carnival of Pedagogy: Theatre and Street,” the festival proposes a radical yet ancient proposition: the street is the first classroom, the first stage, and the first republic of performance. Thrissur, often described as the cultural capital of Kerala and part of the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities, tries to transform into an open university of embodied knowledge. Streets, markets, bus stands, residential alleys, temple grounds, maidan spaces, tea stalls, and street corners will become laboratories where global students, artists, teachers, scholars, and pedagogues gather to rethink performance, citizenship, ethics, survival, ecology, and aesthetics.But this festival goes further.It recognises that the Indian street is not neutral terrain. It is a layered social text shaped by caste, class, gender, labour, religion, and ecology. To enter the street as artists and educators is to enter a field of power.

Urban life unfolds in three interwoven layers:

  1. Physical Infrastructure – The Stage
  2. Observable Activities – The Performance
  3. Characters of Street Life – The Cast

Drawing from thinkers like Jane Jacobs, who emphasised the “eyes on the street,” IFTS 2027 understands the street not as chaos, but as choreography. Yet choreography is never innocent; it is socially organised. The question is not only how the street performs, but who is allowed to perform freely within it.

1. The Physical Elements: The Architecture of Presence

The streetscape, its facades, balconies, verandas, signage, drainage lines, trees, electric poles, tea stalls, and lottery boards create what we may call the scenography of daily life. Buildings form “street walls,” footpaths become processional pathways, awnings act as temporary wings, and street furniture becomes rehearsal partners.

Participants are invited to examine:

  1. The built environment as scenography
  2. Infrastructure as dramaturgy of movement
  3. Street furniture as a performative object
  4. Landscaping and spontaneous vegetation as ecological actors

How does a tree become a lighting designer by day and night through street lights?

How does a broken wall become a metaphor?

How does a zebra crossing become choreography?

2. Observable Activities: The Performance of Survival and Celebration

The street is a continuous rehearsal of coexistence:

  1. Economic Interaction – vending, hawking, bargaining
  2. Social Ritual – tea-stall debates, children playing, elders watching
  3. Civic Action – rallies, festivals
  4. Movement Patterns – the ballet of pedestrians, cyclists, vehicles

Street food, like Mumbai’s vada pav or Kolkata’s kathi roll, or New York’s Hot Dogs, Thrissur’s Kolli Boti or the UK’s Fish & Chips, China’s Dumplings (Jiaozi) or Japan’s Yakoyaki, functions as edible theatre: sound (sizzle), scent (spice), colour (display), gesture (serving). Food is both sustenance and spectacle.

Participants may explore:

  1. Street vending as embodied entrepreneurship
  2. Lottery sellers and informal workers as performative negotiators
  3. Slums as “urban schools” where migrants rehearse citizenship
  4. The ethics of occupying space

3. The Cast: Who Performs the City?

The street gathers archetypes:

  1. Entrepreneurs (vendors, lottery sellers, hawkers)
  2. Performers (musicians, magicians, jugglers, living statues)
  3. Residents (families, elders, children)
  4. Marginalised communities (homeless individuals, migrants and others)
  5. Commuters and flâneurs (walkers who observe and absorb)
  6. Street animals and spontaneous vegetation

In this carnival, we refuse the binary between performer and spectator. Everyone is both.

Indian streets carry the long shadow of caste.

The historical varna framework, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, was not merely a theological classification but a spatial ordering of bodies. Even in contemporary cities, caste survives not always as overt discrimination, but as subtle spatial entitlement.

Caste and Spatial Comfort

  1. Who feels comfortable sitting at a tea stall?
  2. Whose body is seen as “neutral” in public?
  3. Who is watched, suspected, or marked?

Dalit and Adivasi bodies often carry double inscriptions: historical marginalisation and contemporary economic vulnerability. Dominant caste bodies frequently move through space without being read as caste-marked.

Caste also appears through:

  1. Housing segregation
  2. Occupational clustering (sanitation work, waste picking, manual labour)
  3. Access to public toilets and infrastructure
  4. Informal seating hierarchies

The street becomes a theatre where caste is both hidden and rehearsed daily.

For IFTS 2027, this demands artistic inquiry:

  1. Can performance expose invisible hierarchies?
  2. Can the street carnival invert caste-coded space?

Class determines how long one stays in the street, and why.

The middle-class body transits the street.

The working-class body inhabits it.

Street vendors, hawkers, rickshaw pullers, construction workers, lottery sellers, their labour is physically fused with asphalt, dust, rain, and traffic noise. Their presence is not an aesthetic choice but an economic necessity.

Street food—vada pav, kathi rolls, tea stalls—is not only cultural vibrancy but a survival economy. Informal workers negotiate police authority, weather conditions, and municipal regulations daily. Laws such as the Street Vendors Act attempt regulation, but lived realities remain precarious.

Class shapes:

  1. Time of mobility
  2. Exposure to environmental risk
  3. Access to shade, seating, and sanitation
  4. Vulnerability to eviction

In IFTS 2027, we ask:

  1. Is vending choreography?
  2. Is bargaining dramaturgy?
  3. Is survival itself performance?

Public space in India is deeply gendered.

Women often navigate streets through strategies of alertness: altered walking speeds, specific routes, and time restrictions. Working-class women face compounded vulnerabilities - lack of toilets, unsafe transport nodes, and precarious labour timings.

Gender does not operate alone. A Dalit working-class woman’s street experience differs profoundly from that of an upper-class woman. Intersectionality, where caste, class, and gender converge, produces layered exclusions.

Transgender and queer communities have historically occupied Indian streets as both marginalised and visible presences. Their relationship with traffic signals, public rituals, and neighbourhood spaces reveals a complex negotiation between stigma and community assertion.

Thus, the festival must ask:

  1. How do different gendered bodies rehearse safety?
  2. How does performance create temporary zones of dignity?
  3. Can carnival redistribute spatial confidence?
  4. How queerness negotiates ownership of spaces or how these spaces contain double membership.

Slums, often described as informal settlements or shanty towns, are among the most significant yet misunderstood components of contemporary urban India. According to UN-Habitat, a slum household is defined by the absence of one or more core conditions: durable housing built on non-hazardous land; sufficient living space (no more than three persons per room); access to safe and affordable water; improved sanitation; and security of tenure protecting against forced eviction. By these criteria, millions of urban residents live in settlements that exist outside formal planning frameworks yet remain central to the city’s functioning.

The physical cartography of such settlements reveals a dense and adaptive spatial logic. Homes are frequently constructed from salvaged or low-cost materials, corrugated metal, tarpaulin, brick fragments, reclaimed wood, often without formal foundations. Settlements tend to arise on marginal lands: riverbanks, railway edges, marshes, steep slopes, or industrial buffer zones. Their internal layouts consist of narrow, winding alleys that resist vehicular access and challenge emergency response systems. Yet within this apparent disorder lies intricate scenography: multi-functional rooms that serve simultaneously as bedroom, kitchen, and workshop; improvised drainage channels; shared water points; rooftop extensions that signal incremental economic progress. In places such as Dharavi in Mumbai, informal industries, leather, pottery, recycling, and garment production generate substantial economic activity, demonstrating that these areas are not merely zones of deprivation but productive urban engines.

Socially, slums operate through layered hierarchies and relational networks. Externally, residents often occupy the lowest rungs of the broader urban class structure; internally, status may depend on tenure length, caste or regional affiliation, occupation, and access to political intermediaries. Key figures shape daily life: the migrant newcomer learning urban codes; the informal worker, vendor, domestic worker, construction labourer, waste picker, sustaining the metropolitan economy; the community leader or broker mediating access to water, electricity, or political patronage; and the landless squatter living under constant threat of eviction. In the absence of consistent state services, residents frequently develop informal governance systems, collective savings groups, shared sanitation arrangements, and dispute mediation networks, creating parallel infrastructures of survival.

Philosophically and sociologically, the slum can be understood as both stigma and strategy. It is stigmatized as marginal or deviant space, yet it functions as an “arrival city” for rural migrants seeking proximity to employment and social mobility. It embodies paradox: isolation from formal power structures alongside dense networks of mutual aid; economic precarity alongside entrepreneurial vitality; infrastructural absence alongside improvisational ingenuity. Within the broader framework of the Carnival of Pedagogy, the slum emerges not as a peripheral backdrop but as a complex socio-physical ecosystem, a living theatre where questions of land, labour, caste, class, migration, ecology, and aspiration intersect in compressed urban form.

Street theatre historically belongs to those excluded from institutional power — nomads, wanderers, precarious labourers. The concept of the “subaltern,” articulated by Antonio Gramsci and expanded by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, helps us understand how marginalized bodies create alternative forms of speech.

Forms to be explored:

  1. Circle Shows
  2. Walk-by Acts
  3. Stoplight Performances
  4. Street Theatre for Social Change
  5. Social Circus as resilience practice
  6. Flash Mobs and Image Events
  7. Open Street Cinema

Global examples such as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Venice Carnival show how streets can transform into theatres. But IFTS 2027 proposes something deeper:

Can the street transform into a pedagogy of equality? Can pedagogy itself become carnivalesque?

No study of Indian streets is complete without acknowledging the drainage systems and public toilets that structure everyday dignity. Open drains running along market roads, clogged monsoon channels, uneven pavements, and inadequate sewage infrastructure are not merely technical failures; they are spatial markers of inequality. In many cities, informal settlements and working-class neighbourhoods bear the brunt of waterlogging, contamination, and mosquito-borne disease, while wealthier zones benefit from concealed and better-maintained systems. Sanitation labour, historically tied to caste hierarchies, remains one of the most stigmatised and dangerous forms of work, even decades after the enactment of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act.

Public toilets, though expanded under national missions such as the Swachh Bharat Mission, remain uneven in access, maintenance, and safety. For women, the absence of clean, well-lit facilities restricts mobility and working hours. For transgender persons, the lack of inclusive facilities produces daily negotiation and humiliation. For street vendors and informal workers, access to sanitation determines health, productivity, and bodily comfort.

Drainage and toilets, therefore, form a hidden dramaturgy of the street: they decide who can linger, who must rush home, who falls ill, and who performs labour invisibly beneath the city’s surface. In the Carnival of Pedagogy, sanitation is not peripheral; it is central to understanding how infrastructure, caste, class, gender, and ecology converge in shaping the lived theatre of Indian streets.

Indian streets are animated not only by permanent residents but also by bodies on the move, seasonal labourers, internal migrants from rural districts, itinerant performers, and historically displaced nomadic and de-notified communities. Internal migrant workers travel across states in search of construction work, domestic labour, agricultural opportunities, and informal urban jobs; their presence is essential to the functioning of cities, yet their rights and recognition remain precarious, especially in times of crisis such as lockdowns or economic downturns, when they can suddenly become stranded or excluded from support systems.

Alongside migrants, India is home to nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes and de-notified tribes (DNTs), communities once branded as “criminal tribes” under colonial law and officially “de-notified” after independence, whose traditional livelihoods have long revolved around mobility and community-based craft, performance, and survival strategies.1 One example of such groups includes communities historically associated with itinerant performance and ecological knowledge, such as snake-charmers, entertainers, and other peripatetic groups whose presence in markets and fairs shaped cultural economies yet whose economic contributions became marginalised by modernisation.

Despite legal abolition of oppressive designations like the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, many of these tribes continue to be socially stigmatized, landless, undocumented, and economically excluded, often living in informal settlements on the edges of towns and cities, working intermittent jobs such as drain cleaning, construction labour, domestic work, waste collection, or street vending without formal identity documentation or access to welfare schemes. These intersecting conditions of migration and historical stigma make their bodily presence in public space both highly visible and persistently precarious, forging daily negotiations of identity, legality, survival, and cultural memory in the city’s shared streetscape.

By understanding these groups not as peripheral subjects but as embodied actors of street life, IFTS 2027 opens space for dialogue on mobility, colonisation, urban integration, cultural resilience, and performance traditions that emerge from lives lived in motion between borders, states, and social spheres.

Indian streets are not merely the stage for human performance; they are ecological zones where environmental forces and urban systems intersect with daily life in intimate and often overlooked ways. Street environments are shaped by drainage systems, dust and heat islands, vehicular emissions, atmospheric pollutants, and the seasonal monsoon dynamics that flood and drain neighbourhoods. Today’s Indian cities face acute ecological pressures: air pollution from traffic and combustion, noise pollution from incessant horns and engines, and contamination of water bodies from open drains and untreated sewage. Satellite monitoring and air quality indices consistently show that many Indian cities record particulate matter, especially PM2.5 and PM10, at levels far above World Health Organization safe limits, affecting respiratory health and everyday well-being.

While urban greenery, roadside trees, roadside shrubs, and spontaneous vegetation can mitigate heat and improve air quality, these natural actors are often crowded out by concrete expansion, unplanned construction, and poor waste management. Rapid urbanisation has also eroded soil permeability, increasing waterlogging during monsoons and exacerbating surface pollution. Waste segregation and recycling efforts remain uneven, with informal recycling workers (who inhabit and traverse streets daily) bearing the environmental burden of plastic, toxic waste, and hazardous materials, often without protective gear or recognition.

Ecology in the street, therefore, is inseparable from questions of justice: which neighbourhoods receive shade and trees and paved sidewalks? Who breathes cleaner air? Who breathes cleaner air? Who cannot escape noisy highways and polluted drains?

In the context of the Carnival of Pedagogy, these questions invite artists, scholars, and performers to rethink the street not only as social theatres but as ecological theatres. How do urban pollution, climate stress, biodiversity, and infrastructure shape both physical movement and artistic expression? How might performance respond to air quality data? How might theatre give voice to non-human street cohabitants? How might urban choreography include the sound of open drains, traffic noise, birdsong, and wind? In this festival, the street becomes a space to observe, interrogate, and imagine ecological resilience in everyday street life.

Public space operates under formal law, including the Motor Vehicles Act and municipal regulations, yet everyday street life is governed equally by unwritten ethics.

There are acts that are:

  1. Legal but unethical
  2. Ethical but illegal
  3. Performative but policed

Street protests, vulnerability, wall chalking, and silent sit-ins blur the boundary between performance and resistance.

The carnival becomes a temporary suspension of hierarchy, but can it extend beyond the festival days?

Streets are inhabited by:

  1. Street dogs, cows, birds
  2. Spontaneous vegetation
  3. Heat, dust, monsoon rain

Ecology intersects with class and caste: who lives closest to waste zones? Who breathes the most pollution? Who has access to green relief?

The street is a multispecies theatre, and ecological justice must be integrated into pedagogy.

Subject to adequate resources, research collaborations, and required civic and institutional permissions, Thrissur may be engaged as a provisional living laboratory for situated artistic and social inquiry. Key public spaces, markets, temples, churches, and mosque precincts, bus stands, neighbourhood lanes, festival grounds, MG Road corridors, parks, river edges, cafés, and food streets, may be approached respectfully as integrated sites for research, context-responsive performance, dialogue, and ecological observation.

The intention would not be to perform for the city, but to work with its rhythms, communities, and spatial practices, by day and after dark. Participants may, with ethical sensitivity and consent, examine caste-shaped zones of comfort and exclusion; class-based occupational embodiment; gendered mobility and safety patterns; and informal economies as living dramaturgies of survival and exchange.

Thrissur’s nocturnal life, subtly community-rooted, and culturally inflected rather than club-centric, offers a distinct field of inquiry. Evening cafés, late-night eateries, informal street food clusters near temple areas and MG Road, parks, and river edges sustain social interaction until around 11 PM or slightly beyond, while large-scale festivals such as Thrissur Pooram transform the city into an extended nighttime performance arena of percussion, procession, light, and collective gathering. At the same time, public conversations reflect both limitations in sustained late-night culture and aspirations for expanded, safe, culturally grounded evening engagement.

Within this layered day–night ecology, IFTS 2027 may extend street theatre into the nocturnal realm, observe how caste, class, and gendered bodies negotiate space after dark, develop performance formats responsive to rhythm, ritual, sound, and light, and treat the city’s nighttime flows as fieldwork rather than spectacle. All engagements would be undertaken with care, consent, contextual awareness, and rigorous safety planning, recognising the religious, cultural, and civic significance of Thrissur’s public spaces.

  1. Caste and Spatial Entitlement
  2. Class, Informality, and Survival Performance
  3. Gendered Cartographies of Safety
  4. Subaltern Circus and Marginal Bodies
  5. Law, Ethics, and Public Protest
  6. Informal Economies as Urban Theatre
  7. Multispecies Urban Dramaturgy
  8. Carnival as Temporary Equality
  9. Pedagogy Beyond Institutional Walls
  10. Performance as Spatial Justice

“Carnival of Pedagogy: Theatre and Street” proposes that:

  1. The street is not informal; it is an alternative institution.
  2. Caste and class are not abstract categories; they are embodied geographies.
  3. Gender is negotiated through footsteps.
  4. Marginalized practices carry aesthetic intelligence.
  5. Survival is choreography.
  6. Ethics is rehearsed in public.
IFTS 2027 invites global theatre schools to step out of black boxes and into sunlight and dust, into negotiation, discomfort, listening, and shared vulnerability. The festival is not an event imposed on the street. It is a listening practice. A rehearsal of spatial justice. A carnival where hierarchy is questioned through embodied encounter.