OTYP’s Indian Odyssey

By Contributed

Jan 24, 2025

Tanashri Rane, Navedita Singh, Sarah Parsons and Jo Nathan outside the school in Goa.

Two staff members of Outback Theatre for Young People have returned from the trip of a lifetime.

Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content

Local visual artist Jo Nathan and CEO Sarah Parsons went to Goa, India, where they spent two weeks working at the Serendipity Arts Festival – one of the largest in South Asia.

The festival program, titled ‘5800 Miles of Stories’ (the distance between Deniliquin and Goa), was a collaboration between OTYP and Kolkata-based ThinkArts for Children.

The art and theatre workshops were themed around snakes and serpents – a common character in both Australian and Indian creation stories.

During the workshops, the young participants heard myths and legends from both Indian and Australian First Nations cultures, created shadow puppets of characters and animals, made a huge mosaic Rainbow Serpent, and built and decorated a snake house out of cardboard for Vasuki, the Hindu King of the Serpents.

Reflecting on the experience, Jo said it was amazing to meet the Indian artists and “find that we were all so like-minded, with the same values of using art and creativity to build human connections”.

“Sharing stories from Australia and India, we were able to find many similarities between our cultures.

“The highlights for me were being welcomed so warmly into the home communities of the Goan artists, being surrounded by incredible world-class culture and performances as part of the festival and breaking through language barriers with creativity.”

“Jo and I both learned so much from the trip and are grateful to have been a part of the whole cross-cultural creative experience,” Sarah said.

OTYP wants to source more funding to bring the Indian artists to Australia.

The project came about through OTYP’s involvement in a regional alliance of ASIALINK Arts, a program of cultural collaboration with a group of artists and arts workers living in regional areas across the Asia Pacific.