Love Theatre: A transformative workshop

Inspired by bell hooks’ All About Love, this workshop approaches love not as a vague emotion, but as a deliberate, learnable, and ethical practice. Bringing together sociological imagination and psychological reflexive practices, the sessions explore how care, responsibility, intimacy, and emotional wellbeing are lived, shaped, and constrained within everyday realities of caste, gender, sexuality, disability, and mental health. Rather than offering abstract theory, the workshop invites participants into a gentle yet critical self-encounter. Through guided reflection, dialogue, movement, and evidence-informed tools, participants are encouraged to examine their own emotional histories; how we learnt to love, laugh, fear, attach, withdraw, or endure. The workshop creates space to:

• Recognise and name emotions with flexibility and compassion
• Reflect on memories of care, affection, neglect, and harm
• Understand attachment styles, boundary-setting, and patterns of abuse
• Explore how cultural memory and social conditioning shape our ideas of love
• Critically engage with the politics of care—who gives care, who receives it, and at what cost

Facilitated by Dr. Hena N N (Psychologist), Dinu Veyil (Activist & Research Scholar in Sociology), and Jishnu Mohan RT (Malayalam Movement Artist), the workshop treats love as a healing practice rooted in justice, accountability, and relational awareness; something we can unlearn, relearn, and rehearse together. This is not about fixing yourself. It is about understanding yourself—so that love becomes safer, freer, and more ethical.