Nazar Abul Hassain

I know a performance is working when I forget I am performing — not because I have lost control, but because the character is making decisions before I do. As a director, my job is to create the conditions for that to happen in everyone on stage.

I make theatre about the things people cannot say directly — not the arguments, but the silence around them. I am drawn to the moment just before a character breaks, when the body already knows what the mind is still refusing.

The body is my primary dramaturgical instrument. When I wrote and directed Heal the World, a pantomime-musical with no spoken dialogue performed for children as young as six, I stripped the work down to gesture, breath, rhythm and physical presence. No shared language between performers and audience, no explanation — the children understood everything. That gave me my clearest principle: remove the words, and what is left either works or it does not.

My strongest work happens in rooms where people have no obvious reason to be together. At Begin to Believe, I ran devised theatre workshops for adults from entirely different worlds — accountants, engineers, homemakers, people of different religions, classes and mother tongues — drawing out their real stories and building original performances from that material. Each show was a portrait of that specific group: remove one person, and it would not exist.

I carry six languages — Tamil, Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Dakhni, English — not as a credential but as a lived map of different ways of belonging and being excluded. I do not approach the idea of a border as metaphor. I approach it as something I have crossed, and been stopped at, every day of my life.

Teaching is where my practice finds its longest life. What I try to give students is not only technique but a way of being: how to listen before speaking, how to inhabit a perspective not their own, how to stay present under pressure. I want an audience entertained first — but after the entertainment, I want them to leave asking why this story was made now, and find their own life somewhere inside that question.