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Play Yoga Warriors has Ohio State English Connections
When Katherine Burkman, Professor Emeritus in English at Ohio State University, began working on a play about yoga, she mentioned it to her yoga instructor, the American Yogi Richard Esquinas, whose enthusiasm about the project was immediate. Burkman recalls Esquinas saying “I’ll produce it! We’ll go to New York!” Fortunately for Columbus theater-goers, the resulting play, Yoga Warriors, will be performed right here April 19-21, at 8 p.m., and April 22 at 2 p.m., at the Columbus Dance Theatre on 592 East Main St.
The writing of the play was a collaborative effort between Burkman, Esquinas, Ann Hall Deborah Burkman, and Susie Gerald. Each member of the group wrote individual pieces about yoga, workshopped them, and used an improvisational role-playing technique to make the pieces come together as a “whole greater than the sum of its parts,” said Hall, who has a Ph.D. from the OSU English Department and is Professor of Literature and Language at Ohio Dominican University.
Katherine Burkman has been involved in the Columbus theater scene for many years with her theater troupe, Women at Play, a group that used the same compositional method utilized for Yoga Warriors. “We would come up with the ideas for our plays by role playing. So the role playing lead to the collaborated writing. For example, we started one play with just a title, Come into the Garden, Maud. So we would place ourselves in the garden, and decide who we were, and role play how to get Maud out of the garden, because she was a recluse.”
The process of collaboration for Yoga Warriors took about a year. “We dropped pieces that didn’t fit.” said Hall. “We read them as a whole and started noticing things that did or didn’t work. It was transformed. Kathy had final say. I do think that [in order for the process to work] that somebody has to be in charge of it. Then we reviewed it as a group and gave feedback.”
Yoga Warriors shows the comic and serious sides of yoga. “You have a group of people going on a yoga retreat and they are stuck with one another and because of the yoga they start to change. I think that’s what yoga does—it changes your perspective,” said Hall.
Tickets for Yoga Warriors are $20 for general public, $15 for students and seniors. Reservations, while not necessary, can be made by emailing burkman.2@osu.edu or calling (614) 457-6580.
