Focusing on storytelling, the dramatisation of concepts using different forms of expression and on the role of rhythm as an inner text; this laboratory will reveal Adishakti's unique performance practice.

Veenapani Chawla founded Adishakti in 1981 and is its Managing Trustee and Artistic Director. Adishakti is a performance company engaged in the research and reanimation of traditional knowledge in theatre, dance, music, movement, puppet and craft forms with a view to creating a contemporary hybrid aesthetic and performance language.

Adishakti's work and experiments cover those areas, which elliptically involve the performer and her environment medicine,architecture/construction technolog ies and the eco system. For Adishakti is driven, quite simply, by its apprehension of art/aesthetic practice as a unique bridge not only between diverse performance forms, traditions and knowl edge systems but also in fact between a range of diverse realms, which are not normally or visibly in communication with each other.

Veenapani has been recognized by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Department of Culture, the Det Lange Udvalga in Denmark and the India Foundation of the Arts. In 1988, she was nominated to the Advisory Committee of the Kathak Kendra (Sangeet Natak Academy, New Delhi, India), and in 1994 was awarded an extended Senior Fellowship from the Department of Culture in New Delhi. In 1997 she was nominated by the Department of Culture as an expert in the fields of Folk, Traditional and Indigenous Arts. In 1998, she was appointed Trustee on the Board of Trustees of the National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai.

http://www.adishaktitheatrearts.org/index.htm

The Centre for Performance Research has invited some of the most exciting and diverse Wales based and international theatre directors to Aberystwyth for an intensive participatory project that offers a rare opportunity for both experienced and emerging directors to gather and share the methods, approaches and skills of professional directing practice via laboratories and presentations, demonstrations and dialogue.

For more information or to book a place at the Directors' Forum please contact CPR

Email: cprwww@aber.ac.uk Phone: +44 (0) 1970 622 133

The Directors Forum has been made possible with the support of a project grant from the Arts Council of Wales. The Centre for Performance Research at Aberystwyth is a joint venture of The University of Wales Aberystwyth and Centre for Performance Research Ltd, working in close association with AU Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.