At Tara we see workshops as an important part of our work. The workshops we organize are of two kinds: professional workshops and children’s workshops. Through the professional workshops, we would like to expand our network of collaborations with various like-minded organizations, and with writers and artists. In India, there are a number of talented individuals working in isolation. The call for these workshops gives us a chance to get to know and work with them intensely, and develop long term working relationships. Our workshops with children are usually art, craft or performance workshops. We have so far invited resource people from various disciplines—puppet-makers, toy-makers, street theatre artists, and mask-makers. Through these interactions between children and traditional artists, we develop ideas and concepts for books. To us it is very important that a workshop is not an event that lasts just for a few days. We see it as a starting point for work and working relationships that have a much longer life.

CHILDREN’S WORKSHOPS

Gond Workshop
(Tara Books, TERS, The School KFI and The Olcott Memorial School)
Discovering the Gond tradition from Madhya Pradesh was what students experienced over a week at the Olcott Memorial School. Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai and Ram Singh Urveti, three of the finest living artists of the Gond tradition, led students in a discovery of this relatively new tribal tradition. After being introduced to Gond art, students practiced using a motif such as a tree and telling a story around it in a single painting. Working off the Tara book, The Night Life of Trees, which examines the Gond belief that at night the spirit of a tree is revealed, students drew their own trees in the Gond style and created a story around their tree. Over the course of the week, students were taught about symbols, Gond patterning, and the technique required in Gond art. At the end of the week, the students not only had a wonderful painting, but a sense of this emerging Indian art form.

Patua Workshop (Tara Books, TERS, The School KFI and The Olcott Memorial School)
Patua artists Moyna and Joydeb introduced students, ages 9 to 17, to Patua art, the idea of community art, and working together and telling stories thorough art. Patua is an ancient art form practised in West Bengal. The artists sing and recount stories by painting them in sequence – almost like a storyboard – onto long scrolls. Traditionally, Patua artists worked within their own repertoire of stories and tales, but over time they have begun adapting their unique form to reporting events such as 9/11 and the tsunami, and even to spread messages on social issues.

For the students, learning to draw from their imaginations and drawing to communicate through their art was stressed. The children formed pairs and began working on story-songs on scrolls. At the end of the workshop, students had created rich scrolls in the Patua tradition. Tara will be turning this workshop experience into a forthcoming book.

Making Faces
(Tara Books, TERS and The Olcott Memorial School)
Making faces was a colourful five day workshop that was held with the children of the Olcott Memorial School, Chennai. On each of the five days, a traditional South Indian mask maker conducted a full day session with the children. The idea was to expose children to the varied and vibrant craft traditions of the region, and to learn and innovate from them. They first learned the actual making of masks, and then watched the traditional performer do a performance. They then had an hour to ask questions and to interact with the performer.
At the end of the workshop, the children had learned to make masks form papier mache, clay, wood, palm fronds and by painting their own faces. They also took up a challenge that we posed them: to use the masks they had made to come up with a story and put up a half hour play. It turned out to be a wonderful tale about travel, language and miscommunication. The play was staged at the Alliance Francaise de Chennai, where it was a big success.

Toys and Tales
(Tara Books and The School KFI, Chennai)

This was a workshop on folk toymaking with children of different ages. The workshop was conducted by Prof. Sudarshan Khanna of the National Institute of Design—India’s leading expert on indigenous toys. Prof. Khanna regularly conducts workshops for children all around the world, to create awareness about this vanishing craft. Using natural materials and waste, the children recreated and re-designed the toys that Prof. Khanna has collected and documented for over 25 years. During the workshop we discovered that each age group, including adults got something quite different out of the toys. Smaller children were happy just making and playing with their toys, older ones were much more curious about how exactly they worked, and for adults, they raised a number of questions about toys and the nature of children’s play. In 1999 Tara and Sudarshan Khanna conceptualized the workshop experience into a book for all ages – Toys and Tales with Everyday Materials.

Puppets Unlimited
(Tara Books)
Over the course of a month, we invited traditional string, hand, rod and shadow puppeteers to perform for a mixed group of children from various schools in Chennai. After each show, children had the opportunity to talk and interact with the performers, and find out how traditional puppets were made and used in performance. The traditional puppeteers and a team of resource people then worked with the children to help them make their own puppets using found objects and everyday materials. The idea was to keep the basic structural principles of each kind of puppet-making in mind, while adapting the material to what is available in a contemporary urban context. The two focuses of this workshop were how to creatively recycle material, and how to re-define traditions and keep them alive. In 1998, the results of this workshop came out as a book – Puppets Unlimited with Everyday Materials, as part of Tara’s craft series.

Paper and Recycling

(Tara Books at The Children’s Club, Mylapore)
In order to tackle the theme of the paper and recycling industry from an unusual angle, we conducted a series of workshops with ragpicker children who work on the streets of the city. Ragpicker children are invisible to most people, and often considered thieves and vagabonds. The workshop gave the children a perspective on the importance of the work they do. We learned from them about their lives and work. It also provided them creative opportunities, to do such activities as drawing, and putting up short performances. Each batch of sessions lasted for three days. It was an experience that was both stimulating and poignant. In a country like India, the issue of child labour is a very sad and complex one, with no easy answers. As a result of the workshop, Tara published a book called Trash! On Ragpicker Children and Recycling with the view to sensitizing middle-class children to the lives of child labourers. The book has since found a special mention in the White Ravens catalogue of the world’s best children’s books, and is being used in schools in Holland, Italy and India–something that we are very happy to see.

Landscapes: Children’s Voices
(Tara Books)
In February 1994 we conducted a series of writing and art workshops for children living in different eco zones in South India. What is contemporary life like in these various landscapes? We asked children to draw and write about the work their parents do, their beliefs, festivals, crafts, games and tales. The rich material we gathered about their lives and experiences was put together in a book called Landscapes: Children’s Voices. The store of experiential and practical environmental lore we discovered through the workshop led us to re-define our narrow conception of knowledge.

PROFESSIONAL WORKSHOPS

Myths of the City
(Tara Publishing and the Alliance Francaise November 2003)
A four-day long illustrators’ workshop held in November 2003 at Dakshinachitra, on the outskirts of Chennai. As with other workshops of this kind, we hoped to generate aesthetic and other ideas that would eventually lead to innovative visual narratives and texts. Along with three Gond artists from Madhya Pradesh, whom we had specially invited for this workshop, were present artists from Auroville, Pondicheri and France. The workshop revolved around the theme: ‘Myths of the City’. The idea was to identify visual correlates and symbols for the city, as we experience it or know it. As part of the workshop, we organized a tour of Chennai, during which artists sketched, asked questions and acquired their own sense of this old colonial port town. The occasion proved significant for Tara, for it gained us an unexpectedly rich and layered sense of the city we know so well. We were particularly fortunate to have the opportunity to watch Gond artists at work and note their ways of seeing and rendering. Importantly, we came to know Bhajju Shyam and Durga Bai through this project – both of them have since gone on to do major titles for us.

Visual Narratives:
(Tara Books and Max Mueller Bhavan Chennai, November 2001)
The comic form is a relatively unexplored genre in India, and is not really considered a medium of serious communication. Tara was interested in exploring and developing the boundaries of the comic as an art form, and in encouraging its evolution here. With the support of Max Mueller Bhavan, Chennai, we invited as resource people Markus Huber and Isabel Kreitz, two well known German comic book artists who are well known for their attempts to use comics as serious communication. The workshop was attended by eight Indian artists (including well known comic book artists Orijit Sen and Sarnath Bannerjee), and four writers, who worked together to evolve narratives that combined text and image in exciting ways. The sessions that were held over a week, were both theoretical and practical, with participants sharing techniques as well as social and aesthetic concerns. Tara expects to publish work that results from this workshop over the coming year.

Over 16, Under 21
(Tara Books and Max Mueller Bhavan Chennai, March 2000)
This ten-day workshop was conducted with a view to developing this important genre in India. Youth, or teenage has not been a distinct category here until recently. However, although commercial films and advertising recognize this age-group as a category, there is not much literature for youth. We invited as resource people, two established German writers of Young Adult fiction—Andreas Steinhoefel and Anja Tuckermann—to share their views and techniques while writing for this audience. The eight Indian participants were writers from all over India—some established fiction writers, others first time authors. The challenging, and enriching, aspect of this workshop was that we had people who write in Tamil, German, Bengali and English, in conversation with each other. Two of the writers who attended the workshop will publish their novels with us this year, and we expect to have a strong list for young adults over the next few years.

Illustrators in Conversation
(Tara Books and Krishnamurti Foundation of India, Uttarkashi May 1996)
This was a workshop that served as a continuation of our first workshop with illustrators in 1995. Many of the participants were people who had attended the first workshop, and who wanted to carry the conversation further. We were joined by a few newcomers, including Julia Gukova and Vladimir Borsky, two very gifted Russian artists. Once more, the idea was to create a space for creative dialogue and to explore further the possibilities for new kinds of art in children’s literature. There were many conversations, and a lot of bold experimentation with form and content.
Some of the material that evolved from this workshop went on to become complete books. During this workshop, well known children’s illustrator Pulak Biswas produced the book Tiger on A Tree (with writer Anushka Ravishankar). The illustrations won him a plaque at the prestigious Biennale of Illustrations Bratislava 1999 (he is the first Indian to receive the award).

Picturing Words and Reading Pictures
(Tara Books and Max Mueller Bhavan -supported by Deutsche Welthungerhilfe Chennai, February 1995)
This was our first workshop for illustrators, where we brought together a body of people who were interested in pushing the boundaries of children’s book illustration. Twelve Indian and two German illustrators worked together for ten days in a largely unstructured and spontaneous workshop. The idea was to provide a space in which they could experiment, share work and profit from each other’s experiences without the pressure of immediate publishing or commercial concerns. Since artists often work in isolation, each day, people made presentations of their work to the other participants, and the event ended with a public exhibition of the material that emerged during the workshop.
In 1997, Gita Wolf put together the experiences and concerns of the workshop, along with interviews with the artists to create the book Picturing Words and Reading Pictures, the first critical look of illustration and children’s literature from an Indian perspective.