Expressions in Red
Arts Illustrated|April - May 2020
With the play Lal Batti Express, the Krantikaris showed us quite powerfully that ‘what we perceive it to be from the outside – the stigmas we buy into – they are not their truths’
Vani Sriranganayaki
Expressions in Red

We were at the Lady Andal School in Chennai, walking towards its famed Sri Mutha Venkatasubha Rao Concert Hall. We were greeted by a long chequered skyline of the city and two young men handing out coloured markers in red, blue and green. They asked us to use the colours to fill up boxes in the skyline if we were grateful for something – red for family, blue for work and green for health. The idea was to figure out which aspects of our lives we valued most – as individuals and as a society. And that is how the evening began – with a quick but highly insightful exercise that urged one to give a sense of physicality to emotions and then quite literally see it disappear in the sea of several similar expressions. Humbling, to say the least; and we hadn’t even gotten to the main event yet.

This story is from the April - May 2020 edition of Arts Illustrated.

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This story is from the April - May 2020 edition of Arts Illustrated.

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