While we sensitized the tribal students of the Tansa Valley in schools with our everyday environmental education programs, it was a race against time to hope that these children, as they grew up, would conserve their region via the awareness that we created in them. We needed to devise a quick, easy, and effective method of sensitizing the masses in the villages at large, not just the children. What could be easier and simpler than a street play? This is how our environmental street theatre group, “The Living Theatricals,” was conceptualized. 

This is our environmental street theatre group, constituted with the intention of creating mass awareness on environmental issues among the tribal people of the Tansa Valley. This is a group of local tribal children from the Tansa Valley, aged between 10 and 15 years, and our mentors that conduct mass awareness in the villages of the valley on issues of local environmental degradation through street plays and stage plays. This first-of-its-kind thematic theatre in India has taken up issues that are specific to the valley, like human-induced forest fires, methods in rural waste management, groundwater conservation and recharge, methods and techniques in organic farming, the use of herbal plants, etc. Rehearsals and practice sessions are conducted in agricultural fields, along the river banks, under shady trees, etc., where the children can tend to their domestic chores (like cow herding, tending to the farms, harvesting the farm produce, etc.) as well as rehearse simultaneously.