A venture by two friends, Creative Sangha, founded early this year, is a community group that encourages artistic expression without any expectation or competition
KALYANI JHA | NT BUZZ
It was with the intent of creating a space for creatives to express, grow, and learn together that veterinary doctor Anisha Aiyappa and her long time friend Sapna Shahani co-founded Creative Sangha.
“We both identified as creative beings, but we were struggling within our working days to figure out ways to really make that happen,” says Aiyappa. “We realised too that not only is it really important to have space for our creative outlet, but we really missed a creative community that didn’t have a capitalist bent here in Goa. We wanted to do something just for the fun of it, and that included performance, because most of us have a love for that.”
The idea drew naturally from the founders’ own creative journeys. Shahani comes from a background in video, direction, and theatre, while Aiyappa’s experience lies in poetry, spoken word, and music.
Shahani, in her days in U.S., had organised monologue shows and wanted to do the same in Goa as well. And since both of them had read ‘The Artist’s Way’, a book about unblocking creative potential, the idea of Creative Sangha came about.
“The goal was for people to gather together to express what they don’t usually express in the form of a monologue. We find that when we allow ourselves to write and to perform, in other words, be witnessed by an audience, it’s very healing to talk about the difficult things in our life,” says Shahani.
To begin with, earlier this year, they put out a simple flyer inviting writers and storytellers to come together and co-create a performance of curated monologues with a theme ‘Settlers in Goa’.
Over the course of nearly three months, participants met regularly, sharing drafts, refining ideas and shaping their individual stories into a collective performance.
Following the success of the first performance titled ‘Beings in Goa’, the group took a month’s break before opening its doors once again—this time with a new theme.
So far, they have had five performances where people can gather simply for the joy of writing, storytelling and performing. The current project explores dating and relationships in Goa, a subject that the organisers felt offered room for both humour and vulnerability.
“What is really refreshing about this for me as an artist is that it’s creating a community for people who haven’t necessarily performed before but always wanted to,” says Aiyappa.
In fact, the collective has no fixed membership and deliberately keeps its doors open. “We don’t need any extra qualifications. It’s just people that are passionate about writing and storytelling and performing on stage,” say the veterinary doctor. “We all help each other to improve our pieces, use techniques and grow together. But there’s no gatekeeping on it at all.”
Every gathering follows a familiar structure of introduction followed by participating in creative exercises designed by Aiyappa. Artists then have few minutes to themselves to create and write and later share together where each one is further guided and helped to refine their writing if required.
“For one recent session, participants were invited to imagine their creativity as a living being. The exercise was: if your creativity is a living being, what would it look like? What would it sound like? What textures would it have?” shares Aiyappa adding that this gives writers something to start with.
Each session ends with participants sharing their work if they wish, followed by feedback. “We’re very clear that the important thing is constructive criticism. We proactively encourage positive constructive criticism to minimise judgment,” says Aiyappa.
The group is intentionally avoiding rigid deadlines for the performance. “It’s important to us that people have space. We don’t want to rush it, but probably within the next couple of months would be when we put on a performance. Until then, the meetings continue every few weeks, with ideas evolving between sessions through conversations and shared inspiration on the group’s WhatsApp thread,” says Aiyappa.
“We hope that the group will grow, but that is not our main goal. We only want to provide a platform for people to process some of the goings on in our lives under different themes,” says Shahani.
