Vayu Naidu is a performance storyteller ‘committed to the renaissance of storytelling as a performative art within contemporary culture’. The Vayu Naidu Company is a touring independent Storytelling Theatre based in Canterbury, South East England.
Vayu Naidu was born in Delhi. She studied in India and the USA and took Europe's first doctorate in performance storytelling from the University of Leeds in 1994. She is founder and Artistic Director of Brumhalata Intercultural Storytelling Company, based in Birmingham, which has collaborated with a range of artists, including - in the 1997 Parting Company, celebrating 50 years of Indian independence - composer Judith Weir, tabla player Sarvar Sabri and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.
Vayu Naidu's short stories include Cultures of Silence (Virage 1994) and Twisted Tales (Star Publications 1997). Her children's stories Biswas is Born and Biswas has a Hump (Harper Collins 1992) are now an animated film for Channel 4 learning. Her regional folktales for Turlink Publishers, Chennai, include Eyes on the Peacock's Tail, The Magic Vessels, Curly Dog's Tail and Hiss! Don't Bite. Her text, Storytelling and the Healing Art of Narrative: The Empty Vessel (Jessica Kingsley 1999), centres on the significance of storytelling in multicultural education, therapy, performance arts, battered women's shelters and prisons, where she has worked sharing her skills. Vayu Naidu's new play, There Comes a Karma, was selected for Radio 4's Chasing the Rainbow series. She writes for the Leicester Haymarket Theatre, where she is Artistic Associate.
Vayu Naidu is currently Lecturer in the Department of Drama , School of Drama, Film and Visual Arts at the University of Kent. She was appointed following a post doctoral Fellowship in Creative and Performing Arts by the Arts and Humanities and Research Board (AHRB 2001-2004, now AHR Council) and was hosted by the Drama Department at Canterbury, University of Kent. Her work was titled: The Presence of Absences: exploring technique and manifestation in the contemporary performance Storyteller.
Vayu Naidu Company Limited was founded on the basis of creating new frontiers for performance and engaging transcultural practice in an interdisciplinary way. This has been supported by Arts Council England and all the above institutions as well are gratefully acknowledged for their support, including Gulbenkian Theatre. Vayu Naidu Company Limited is now based as the Leathermarket, London.
As a performance Storyteller, she has created new work, but significantly established both for general audiences, and students of performance in Higher Education an interest and methodology in Storytelling and cultures of oral traditions. Her work ranges from being a soloist, working with Contemporary Music composers and musicians, Orchestras, and world musicians, as well as in theatre writing for the stage, radio, and as an actor in television and film.
Vayu Naidu’s most recent new work includes NOTHING BUT THE SALT that has been on a South Asian Theatre Consortium tour after premiering in the Canterbury Festival at Gulbenkian Theatre. Her adaptation of MANNIMEKALAI and PSYCHE for composer Judith Weir was featured in Channel 4’s documentary on ARMIDA AND OTHER STORIES (Dec 2005 and February 2006).
Her work will be featured in Palgrave’s WOMEN AND NARRATIVE ed. By Gerry Harris and Elaine Aston (2007) and has featured in Michael Wilson's STORYETLLING AND THEATRE (Palgrave, 2005).
'in Vayu's performances are also intertwined complex notions of multicultural perspectives, journeys - both physical and metaphorical, migration and diaspora. She uses what she calls the`old, old tradition from this civilisation' adds a dash of `today' here, a sparkle of wit there and lo behold! she has `Mobile Geographies' ready for you.' (Ramya Kannan in The Hindu, 2 february 2001)
South is a visually stunning, cross-genre performance that brings together contemporary and South Indian (bharata natyam) dance performance.
Developed with jazz musician Orphy Robinson, South explores ‘the meaning of geographical direction,’ drawing on the experience of refugee communities in coastal locations in the South East of England, where Vayu is based, Cornwall, Chennai, South Africa, and Greece.
Richly cross-cultural and combining diverse contemporary and traditional practices, Vayu Naidu’s work explores and articulates the presence of the narrative storyteller, transposing RASA, ‘the essence of performance,’ toward the creation of performer presence.
In her workshop practice, she works to focus RASA, taking ‘a journey through the nine principal human emotions that give an impulse to movement and then to story.’
Vayu Naidu’s research on performance storytelling was the basis of a prestigious Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Fellowship in the Creative Arts at the University of Kent, UK, from 2001-2004.
The Company’s website is at [link]
For a review of Nothing but the Salt see [link]; for Future Perfect'' see [link]
These images are from Vayu Naidu Company’s inaugural production South (2002), directed by Chris Banfield.
Images courtesy Vayu Naidu Company.
