The Pocket Company was started by Niranjani Iyer in 2010. Collaboration and collective enquiry form the basis of most the company’s work in India and in France.
A key example of this is d.r.i.f.t -dharamshala residential & international festival for theatre, a community driven volunteer run project in the Himalayan foothills since 2016.
Gender-Ventions is another key project which took to the streets of New Delhi after a particularly horrendous incident of violence against women to open up conversations on safe access to public spaces. The desire to engage, dialogue and entertain is the foundation of our work.
Selected Projects
Choreography
Choreography with speech and hearing impaired adults to create a dance piece where they worked on phrases they had created as responses to questions from Niranjani.
An interactive public performance that invites the audience to renew their way of looking at their familiar spaces using a choreographed mode of observation, through frames.
Supported by the Goethe Institut, this piece was performed in public parks in Delhi.
A tanztheater performance inspired by the book ” Warum Das Kind in der Polenta Kocht ” by Aglaja Veteranyi explores displacement, movement, and a longing for home. The piece looks at the outsider, the foreigner, the performer. How does one feel amidst strangers?
Niranjani Iyer
Founder and director of The Pocket Company, Niranjani lives and works between France and India, where she runs d.r.i.f.t – a community-oriented theatre festival she created in the Himalayas. She is an actor, dancer, director, choreographer, dramaturge and pedagogue. Her approach to work is interdisciplinary and rooted in a belief in the necessity of art in everyday life.