Kalpesh & Pratiksha, we both are founder of Tiny Tales. We are graduates of Lalit Kala Kendra. After graduation, We got a fellowship called 'Goshtrang'.
In this residential fellowship, we work for adivasi kids for a year, the work was based on Language development through art & stories.
At the end of that fellowship, after performing stories and plays for children in several schools and by listening to the experience as how it affected them, we decided that this wisdom and this understanding of these little minds shouldn’t be restricted to this village itself and should reach out to every child out there in every school in every village and litrate them through theater & stories.
And the outcome of this strong belief is our small little step, ‘Tiny Tales’.
We tell stories to children. We illustrate and perform tales for children, which are generally from children’s literature, we select stories on the basis of 'age group, time span, their surrounding, needs'. & present through the medium of theater.
Up till now, there have been plays specially crafted for children and are still being made; but not everyone has the privilege to see that play in a theater or an auditorium. So we solve this problem by performing the play in their space, in their surroundings. And if we do theater then that doesn’t mean we need a stage, proper lights etc for our performance; we can perform our plays in a school classroom, on playgrounds, under the shed of a tree and various other open places. Basically, a play can lit up any space given to it and make it alive.
We demonstrate the stories in front of children by performing it ‘live’ in front of them and give them the pleasure of a ‘live performance’.
Through our story telling, we try to explore a different world for them in which they can experience various possibilities of things and broaden their way of thinking. Also, though theater is a form of entertainment, time spent in watching or doing theater helps in “social development of children” and pushes the capability of a child beyond its limit.
To know whether the children have understood the story, there are various activities before starting a story and after finishing it which includes a lot of games. These games entertain them thoroughly and also make them understand the story much better. After finishing a tale, children are made to sing the songs from the tale and actual copies of the tales/books are shown to them at the end of the performances. The stories are presented in front of the children without altering the content of the book.
At the end of performance they are eager to find out how the characters look in the books, so they run towards book. And hence, the journey from spoken words to written words get easier for them.
So now we perform stories all over Maharashtra. We pick-up our bag and leave for performance. We travel through different villages, tribal areas, we want to reach as many as kids as possible. We want to develop theater for kids in Maharashtra, in their mother tongue.
Up till now, we have reached 52,000 kids of all over Maharashtra through shows & different projects.
We also have no of project for teachers, schools on how to use theater in education.
Our aim is to work with kids as per their needs.
In this journey we are trying to connect people, we try to find their stories, their sorrows & want to fill up the with love. It’s journey of Love, books, people, nature, stories, kids & Theater.
