Gunjan Dixit: How Chevening and Leeds Deepened an Existing Practice in Applied Theatre

Imagine watching a performance in Kathmandu where the stage has a sign language interpreter. Where audio description is available for audience members who cannot see. Where the story being told belongs to people who are rarely told their story matters.

This is not a description of the future. It is what Gunjan Dixit has been building since she came home from Leeds.

But to understand why she built it, you have to understand what she saw when she left.

Although Nepal has strong artistic traditions, opportunities for structured training and development in applied theatre, particularly in areas like social inclusion and community engagement, are still evolving. Gunjan had been working in this space for years, building her practice largely from instinct and conviction, without the academic frameworks, the peer community, or the international exposure that would have told her: this is a real field, with a real body of knowledge, and you are doing something that matters.

She needed distance to see that clearly. She needed to go away.

The UK, with its policy-driven, community-engaged arts sector, its professors who are both active practitioners and academics, was the place with everything she was looking for. Chevening got her there. MA Applied Theatre and Intervention at the University of Leeds.

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Gunjan believes her application stood out because her career path told a single, consistent story. Not a story she had constructed for the committee — a story she had been living.

As an IBDP Theatre teacher, a co-founder of Phulbari Playback Theatre, a facilitator and director — every role pointed in the same direction. Chevening is not looking for a person who has done everything. It is looking for a person whose past and future are clearly in conversation with each other. Hers were.

"Trust your journey, remain consistent, and clearly articulate how your experiences connect to your future goals," she advises. The word consistent is the one to hold. Not perfect. Not decorated. Consistent — in a way that the committee can feel across years of a life, not just across pages of an application.

The interview, she says, was both nerve-wracking and affirming in the same breath.

She walked in confident, not because she had rehearsed perfect answers, but because she had done something more useful. She had revisited her application thoroughly and reflected on her motivations until the answers felt instinctive. Until they stopped feeling like responses she was giving to a panel and started feeling like things she simply knew about herself.

"Go back to your application," she advises anyone who has just been shortlisted. "Really understand your own narrative — why this course, why now, and what you hope to do with it. Be clear about the gaps you want to fill and speak honestly about your journey."

And then the four words that carry everything:

"Confidence comes from clarity."

This is the best single piece of interview advice in this series — and it works beyond interviews. Clarity about who you are and where you are going is not just preparation for a panel. It is how you walk into any room and belong there.

Being away from Nepal gave Gunjan something she hadn't anticipated: the ability to see her own practice from the outside.

When you are inside a context, building your work day by day, within the constraints and assumptions of the ecosystem around you, it is almost impossible to see what is missing. You absorb the limits of your environment as facts. The UK dismantled those facts one by one.

She watched a wide range of performances — genres, forms, and ambitions she hadn't encountered in Nepal. She engaged with artistic communities across disciplines. She participated in cross-disciplinary projects. She travelled solo, had conversations with people from entirely different backgrounds, and let herself be challenged by what she saw.

Two moments have stayed with her most. The first was a university pen-pal exchange — the kind of initiative that might seem peripheral to the academic experience. She didn't treat it that way. She formed a close and lasting bond with an older British participant, a friendship that outlasted the programme and still means something to her. In a year spent learning about applied theatre's capacity to bridge difference, this was difference bridged.

The second was shadowing a senior sociodramatist, a practitioner who uses dramatic methods to work with social systems and communities. Through that shadowing, she found herself working and improvising alongside a group of actors aged 50 and above.

Working alongside people with such varied lived experiences was transformative. It reminded her that theatre is not only about training or performance, but also about listening, presence, and shared humanity.

The friendships she formed with that group remain, she says, among the most memorable and enriching parts of her entire journey. And the model, intergenerational, inclusive, using lived experience as primary material, came home with her.

Gunjan returned to Nepal with a renewed commitment to the kind of work she had cared about. Her Chevening experience helped her deepen her approach to inclusion, reflection, and accessibility in the arts. Since returning, she has incorporated practices such as sign language interpretation and audio description into performances, helping make theatre more welcoming to a wider range of audiences. She has also facilitated reading and writing circles, intergenerational projects, and creative spaces that encourage participation across differences in age, background, and ability.

She initiated intergenerational arts projects that brought together people across age groups, abilities, and backgrounds, drawing directly from what those 50+ improvisers in Leeds had shown her about what theatre can hold.

As co-founder of Phulbari Playback Theatre, she deepened her practice in a form that makes community stories visible in real time. Playback theatre works like this: an audience member shares a personal story, and a group of performers turns it into immediate theatrical performance — giving the storyteller the experience of seeing their own life reflected back to them on stage. In a country where whose story gets told is still often determined by social position, this is not a small thing.

As an IBDP Theatre teacher, she brought the rigour and international perspective of her Leeds training into Nepali classrooms — expanding what her students understand about what theatre can do and who it can reach.

And she is now collaborating with a fellow Chevening scholar on projects at the intersection of arts and climate change, using theatre as a platform for the kind of community dialogue that policy documents alone cannot generate. The Chevening alumni network, in her experience, is not ceremonial. It is a working resource.

"I carry that with me in my practice," she says. "And I try to continuously share and apply what I've learned in ways that are relevant to my own community."

Each of these threads leads back to the same source: distance showed her what proximity had hidden.

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This series has profiled economists, architects, lawyers, and development workers.

Each one making a case, through their work, for why their field matters.

Gunjan Dixit makes a different kind of case. Not that applied theatre is as legitimate as these other fields — but that it reaches places they cannot. That a community circle using creative expression can surface what a policy paper cannot access. That a performance with sign language interpretation in Kathmandu is making a statement about whose stories count. That improvising alongside people who have lived fifty years of experience teaches something that no classroom can replicate.

She saw all of this clearly from a distance. From Leeds. Looking back at Nepal.

Art goes beyond entertainment, it can shape how communities connect, reflect, and imagine together.

If you are an artist in Nepal, a theatre practitioner, a musician, a designer, a filmmaker, wondering whether Chevening is for someone like you: Gunjan's answer is already in what she has built since she came home.

Sometimes you need to leave to see what you came back to do.

Applications for the 2026–27 Chevening Scholarship open in August 2026.

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Gunjan Dixit is a Chevening Scholar, IBDP Theatre Teacher, co-founder of Phulbari Playback Theatre, and freelance theatre artist and consultant based in Nepal. Her work spans performance, facilitation, direction, and inclusive arts practice. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Story #007 — ScholarsNext | Chevening Nepal Series

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