Günter Nistchke is by training a renowned architect, scholar and landscape designer. He has taught at MIT, Princeton, UCLA and Kyoto's Seika University and written scores of monographs and books on historical, aesthetic and spiritual aspects of Asian architecture and design.

By passion and predilection, however, Günter is also an uproarious iconoclast, who has spent great stretches of life battling dogma and stupidity, and devoted his knowledge, skill and insights to sparking a redeeming new round of evolutionary advance. His work and wisdom have inspired USW planning from the outset, since his vision unites a love of laughter and sensuous beauty with an eco-empathic embrace of sustainable green tech. In addition to ongoing work at his Institute for East Asian Architecture & Urbanism in Kyoto, Günter has conceived a new initiative to open sustainable architecture departments in universities around the world and will be beginning pilot projects shortly in Bali and Nepal. He will be helping us apply those same green principles to our Udaipur constructions and gleefully dousing us with his scathing wit if our goody-goodness gets too far out of hand.

Piki Chappell has been a volcanic Theater 3.0 creative force for two decades now with a career stretching from San Francisco's rich underground art/music scene and Burning Man culture to the "cirque nouveau" renaissance of Montreal, Quebec. During his early West Coast years, Piki "the musician plus" churned out astonishing performances including pieces feauring his note-perfect inverted cello playing, flying pianos, and foot fretting a tuned 'musical' tightrope while playing it with a bow.

In Montreal he designed haunting new instruments and musical interludes for Cirque du Soleil shows, performed in many Cirque galas & premiers, and served for years as musical director of Circo de Bakuza. He has sung, DJed, and jammed with music greats around the world, and is currently turning his imaginative focus to Japan and India. He will be helping us design collaborative soundscapes for Udaipur performances and brilliant low-tech sensor arrays that allow dancers to trigger and "compose" their own music and light show accompaniment with their movements on the stage in real time.

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Suresh Pillai recently finished a distinguished 3-year term as founding project head of the Diaspora Program at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, where he made a heroic effort to highlight the marvelous and painful history of India's Roma/gypsy people as they journeyed through the world. Suresh was originally educated for and excelled in geo-political journalism working as a correspondent in Delhi, the West Indies, Canada, the Middle East, and Serbia. During these years he also mastered the arts of documentary film working with international firms like HBO on Once More Removed and Dutch Television on coverage of Indian minorities in the Caribbean. He went on to produce and direct his own moving works on overseas Indian communities, including Purano Manush, his most recent documentary on the plight of Roma/Gypsies in Kosovo, Serbia. As a cultural historian, Suresh also created the Arikamedu Museum Gallery to document archeological evidence from the Arikamedu Pondicherry sites that established their connections with the Roman Empire in the pre-Christian era. He will be working with USW less as a curator and more as a catalyst, however, striving to create a new "living museum" paradigm that not only celebrates Roma/Gypsy history and culture, it will also offer them a collaborative stage to define themselves and express their own amazing gifts in their own voices to the outside world.
 

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A graduate from National School of Drama, Bhanu has directed more than 70 plays in his eventful 40-year theatrical journey. To augment his deep grounding in Indian traditional and contemporary theatre, he joined University of Tokyo to study the traditional theatre of Japan. He has also spent many years studying the life and ritualistic art of the Bheel tribe of Mewar region of Rajasthan. Working with Bheel performers, he produced "Pashu Gayatri", a Malayalam play, which was widely hailed as an imaginative masterpiece. "Working with tribals is a unique experience. There I am no director; they are not actors... I went there for my own education. I unlearnt what I have learnt in drama school and university.. My interaction with Bheels has opened up a whole world of fascinating rituals and their living connection with the community."

Bhanu has occupied several prestigious positions in the field of dramatic art: Head of the Drama Department of Rajasthan University, Director of the Delhi Shri Ram Centre for Art and Culture, and chairman of Rajasthan Sangeet Natak Akademi. He has been honoured by several prominent cultural bodies for his contributions to the intercultural enrichment of Indian theatre.  See more about his extraordinary achievements at www.bhanubharti.com.

Argentinean born, Pepe Ozan is a renowned sculptor, designer, ethno-videographer and originator of the Burning Man Operas . Since 1975 Pepe has worked in San Francisco in production and direction for "Unity Fair", Theater Artaud, Noh Oratorio Society, Intersection for the Arts, Mission Cultural Center and "Theater for the New City". Starting in 1994 he created a series of increasingly magnificent operatic spectacles and their accompanying architecture that helped define the evolution of Burning Man.

Pepe is also co-founder of Artnetwork Productions, an award winning independent film company focused on the documentation of ancient, indigenous and nomadic peoples and the development of projects promoting urgent preservation of vanishing cultures and the environment. In 2001 he spent 7 months in India filming "Ganga Ma: A Pilgrimage to the Source", a haunting study of India's most sacred river and the people who physically and spiritually depend upon her. He returned for another 7 months in 2002 to create "Jaisalmer Ayo - Gateway of the Gypsies," a critically acclaimed study of Rajasthan's rich nomadic cultures that seeded the global Romany diaspora and remain a powerful artistic influence in India today. Pepe will return to India in 2009 to finish his latest film (on Hinduism) and assist the evolution of Udaipur Shakti Works.

Click here for an intimate and revealing conversation with the master himself.

Julio Peralta is a healer skilled in many disciplines, having lived in India for over 30 years and studied various techniques of meditation, yoga and energy work. Precocious spiritual experiences led him toward the healing arts and he achieved mastery in the practices of Fantan Chi Gung, Reiki, Pranic Healing, Acupressure, Reflexology, therapeutic Mudras and PyraVastu.

Julio finally integrated his rich repertoire into Pranergia, his own unique healing system that also embodies  mystical insights and methods he absorbed from his personal studies with J. Krishnamurti, Osho Rajneesh, Punjaji, Dhirendra Brahmachari, the Dalai Lama, and the great Mongolian master Tsa Gaadai.

According to Julio, the ultimate goal of Pranergia is to harmonise fragmented spiritual and physical energies, and re-engage the primordial vibrations of life, thereby restoring psychosomatic balance, health and vitality.

Julio currently divides his time between India and Spain where the remarkable effect of his therapies has earned him a thriving practice, especially among the intelligentsia; and he is now developing a major healing center in Barcelona where he can teach as well. For more on this gifted healer, see his website: www.julioperalta.com.

John Brisbin is the Managing Director of BoaB interactive, a boutique knowledge management consultancy serving Australia's research science and natural resource admin communities.

An avid student of complex information systems, John has worked as a solution designer and project manager for a wide variety of community, state and Commonwealth agencies, including 5 years with the pioneering Social Change Online team. After working with Udaipur-based NGO Jagran Jan Vikas Samiti in 2002, John completed a Masters in Social Ecology for his research into local food systems and went on to create the Australian Community Foods portal. (See John's interview on this inspiring project here.)

John subsequently served as Coordinator of Alice Springs' Arid Lands Environment Centre and Executive Officer of the Northern Territories Natural Resource Management Board in Darwin before moving on to Boab in Townsville with his attorney wife Caroline Lieber and luminous daughter Varsha Rose.

In addition to helping USW with project management and online strategy, John and Caroline are expected to draw on their eventful years with Culture Lab International and mantic maven network to add numinous epiphanies to the creative chaos on the ground.

Swami Rajneesh received his name and calling from his philosopher/mystic guru Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, whose path he has followed since 1981. After 30 years of rigorous practice, Swami Rajneesh finally stepped out onto the world stage with the publication of his own memoir and meditation guide, Tears of the Mystic Rose.  Ever since the Swami has been on the road year round, spreading the Bhagwan’s teachings across Europe, Asia and his own native India. He teaches the healing arts of stillness, totality and vertical awareness through taichi, vipassana, silent satsang and euphoric dance. With millions of visitors to his website and ever expanding audiences on the ground, he seems to be succeeding at his central mission of spreading love and life-changing insights to all who cross his path. For more on his global activities, visit his inspiring website here.

Beatnik, hippie, punk rocker, motorcycle gang rider, street fighter, meditator, Kung Fu adept, Astanga Vinyasa yoga master. The ultimate experiential explorer Duncan Wong grew up hard and fast from San Francisco wild child roots and embraced all the high energy scenes he encountered. Casting his net wider for the past 30 years Duncan journeyed to China, India, Korea and Japan to train with hidden or famed teachers in ancient martial arts and healing body-mind disciplines. He abstracted the most naturally powerful movements and techniques from all these traditions and integrated them into a flowing holistic exercise ritual which he calls Yogic Arts. Duncan has shared his unique multi-disciplinary yoga with celebrities like Sting, Bjork, and Madonna as well as Balinese orphans and the street kids of L.A.  Yogic Arts, says Master Wong, basically reflect his own lifestyle which strives to remain wild and free and continuously expand the energetic delight of the body.

Duncan will both be visiting Udaipur for workshops and guidance as well as helping us integrate our performance, dance and healing worlds. For more on his path and precocious powers see YogicArts.com.