DINNER IS AT 8, a play for toddlers 4 to 5 yrs 

Age: 4 yrs to 5 yrs
Time: 12.30 PM 

About the play: Dinner is at 8 uses steel utensils as its central object of play. While steel utensils work as a sensory medium through the play of sight and sound for our very young audiences, they also metaphorically allow us, the creators of the play, to think through the concept of the everyday. We choose to look at every day not just as the idea of the routine, the mundane and the
ordinary, but as that which accommodates the special in the mundane, the extra in the ordinary.
Every day is how we live and what we do, yet it also is the break that stops what we do and how we live. This play is an ode to this notion of the everyday.

Team: HEAD START MONTESSORI HOUSE for Children 

Duration: 30 Minutes
Performed by: Samta Shikhar & Pratyush Singh
Co-Direction: Ashwini Kumar Chakre
Direction: Subhashim Goswami

Collaborators for the project
Samta Shikhar, a theatre pedagogue and an actor who has worked with children as a theatre facilitator for more than a decade nationally and internationally. Her approach to the theatre with and for children has been shared in workshops and through performances with children, teachers, artist, and pedagogues. She creates plays with children and also acts in plays for children. She is the only one from India who creates plays for toddlers and currently she heads the theatre department at Head Start Educational Academy Bangalore. She is the actor of this play.

Subhashim Goswami is a doctorate in Sociology and is currently a visiting faculty at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and the Department of English, Shiv Nadar University where he teaches a course on academic writing. Subhashim has been a researcher and a media practitioner for many years before he went back to pursue his doctoral research. His interest in theatre for toddlers is an extension of his sociological practice which allows him to work in communicating concepts through a play of the tangible. Dinner is at 8 is the second toddler play that he has directed.

Ashwini Kumar Chakre is the artistic director of Mashaal theatre troupe founded in 2007 in Bangalore. He primarily works as an actor, writer, and a director. He has also worked as a theatre pedagogue in the theatre department at Head Start Educational Academy and directed plays with children. He was a part of Directors Lab 2013 at the Lincoln Centre Theatre in New York.
Recently he has trained in playwriting at Writers Bloc IV organized by Rage theatre in association with the Royal Court Theatre, London.