(This is the first in a series on Guerilla Functionaries - independent artists who are actively involved in arts education )
This morning I received
the following email from Sahana Ramprasad, a lovely young student at Inventure
Academy, Bangalore, who has attended Summer Theatre Camp at Infinite Souls:
dear kirtana ma'am ,
i had enjoyed the theatre camp last year and am
looking forward to the next one .
i have acted in a big production in my school.
It was called Muse-ical magic ,and i
was playing one of the main roles.
well, after that i have got even more interested
in drama and a lot of my friends at school are interested to come for the camp
this year.
so if you could please send the information
about any future camps happening it would be great !!! :) :)
missing you alot
and i wish you and cookie sir a very happy and prosperous
new year ahead!!! :) :)
Here is the back story...
I recently blogged about the Annual Day malaise in Bangalore
schools. In my experience, well, annual day events usually make me want to swallow my tongue and rip my eyes out because the process is so anti-child and the content so imitative, that I figured they're all bad. Then, at the IFA/Goethe
Institut Arts Education conference in December 2010, Annual Day Plays (ADPs) were
the subject of heated discussion amongst those more learned than myself. Dr.Pawan Sudhir of the NCERT brought it
up in her presentation and all the arts educators (and even school teachers) present complained that most
schools continue to doggedly stick to this "spectacle" approach despite the NCERT
Curriculum Guidelines and the Seoul Agenda clearly asking that schools desist
from this form of "culture-ficating" because it does nothing for the emotional or intellectual well being of the child. (Oh, sure, any child will eventually have a good time baying Hakuna Matata in a lion costume, but then equally, any child will declare Cheetos and Sour Punk to be perfectly logical breakfast food. So "fun" cannot be used to make the case for ADPs, it's weak.) But despite the writing on the wall, administrators find it
simpler to rustle together a flashy ADP by any means possible
rather than embark on a deep process, as the single point agenda is usually to
"raise the prestige of the school". Parents rarely complain because they are stressed to begin with and are quite happy to accept any evidence of expression from their children. So who will raise the bar?
Then, out of the blue....
My nephew Kai, who studies at Inventure Academy, comes home one recent evening absolutely spellbound by Muse-ical
Magic, a play that the Inventure had put up. And it wasn't just him, it was my entire family. Apparently the students
had been involved in all creative decisions and in every production detail from
music to ticket design. The process was facilitated by Arati Punwani-Sunawala,
director of Tarantismo Creative Dance Company. The dramaturg to the project was
Ram Ganesh Kamatham.
Unbelievable, such a departure from the norm! A couple days ago (this is a true story) one Theatre Lab student who is a sutradhar in yet
another local annual day play told me that her teachers said she wasn't to move
her arms an inch and that she was to make no eye contact with the audience but instead
must keep her eyes on the sound console! I'm not making this up! And this is typical of the top-down approach to performance in most schools.
Inventure Academy, on
the other hand, seems to have taken a child-centric approach and in doing so is
in tune with progressive global policies on arts education. Perhaps keeping
one's ear to the ground, and really listening to the children
and prioritizing their needs is all that is required.
Below are two interviews with Arati and Ram that offer an insight
into the successes and challenges of working in this "deep process"
fashion.
Interview with Arati Punwani-Sunawala
Director - Tarantismo Creative Dance Company
Q 1: The way this play was developed is clearly new.
How much were you involved with the process? Did you meet the children? Have
discussions with them?
Arati: Inventure Academy approached us to direct a high school
musical with 250 children! The children were aged 10-16, an
age group that will commit only if they are convinced.We decided
immediately that the most effective way to get the children to engage was to
provide them with a sense of ownership. The ideas would come from the children,
the outline of the story from us and the script would be written by Ram Ganesh
Kamatham, a writer with sharp wit and quirky insight.
We first met the children in September 2010 in large groups. We put them
through a series of theatre games and exercises and then worked with them on
concept development. Each child was asked to submit a sheet of paper with 3
things that they would like the production to be about, one distinct memory
from the past 5 years and one thing they wished to change about the world. We
insisted on the submissions being anonymous and therefore we hoped that they
would be honest. After spending a sleepless night sifting through the
submissions, we found a few recurrent themes, thoughts and ideas. We sent the
list across to Ram and then began the casting process.
Q 2: How much did the school and faculty engage with the creative
process?
Arati: What makes Muse-ical Magic unique from other projects is Inventure
Academy was open to not solely approaching the production as a
spectacle but as an opportunity to expose the children to the various elements
involved in putting together a production. For us as performing art
educators, this was a huge step forward! Ever so often emphasis is put only on
product and almost none on process. We created different departments and the
children were given the opportunity to choose their area of interest. Before
the Dussera vacation began, every child had joined either the design, dance,
music, multimedia or acting department.
Q 3: So how did you get the children to commit, how
did you draw them into the process?
Arati: The members of Tarantismo brainstormed for hours and hours
to find a way to use the ideas provided by the children to create a story that
was cool, current and entertaining; but it also needed substance! Finally the
ideas we chose to focus on were - 'a Disney character', 'the day my life
changed', 'Greek Gods', 'football', rags to riches' and last but certainly not
the least - 'Magic'! We researched various famous individuals that had life
altering moments and finally decided upon one historical character - King
Ashoka; a football star - Pele; and local software heroes - Sudha &
Narayan Murthy. We researched each of these characters thoroughly, put together
interviews, anecdotes and incidents from their lives. For a Sutradhar, we chose
the 9 Greek Muses of the Arts and a lamp-less Aladdin became our Hero. We sent
the information and outline off to Ram and presto! He gave us a script that the
we, the children and the school all loved instantly!
School re-opened at the end of October and all the departments
kicked in to high gear. The show was staged on campus on the 17th &
18th of December 2010. The tickets, posters, brochures, costumes and props were
all designed by the children. The student band and choir provided live music
while the dancers covered the stage with energy and enthusiasm. The video
clips were sourced, edited and projected onstage by the tech savvy whizz kids
in the multimedia department. Sets and props were brought on and off stage by
the trusty backstage bunch. The senior students handled decor, ushering and
even compered the evening! And of course the script was brought to life by the
extremely talented actors.
Q 4: Any last thoughts?
Arati: If this production started out as a blank canvas, the
painting that went up on stage was plotted, painted and perfected by each child
bringing their own special colour to it. And to make sure not a single stroke
was out of place, they were ably and patiently guided by their extremely
talented teachers. But what's an artist without a patron? The management of the
school painstakingly provided time, space and the required resources to ensure
that this painting will have a special place on the wall and we hope in the
audience's hearts!
Art, any art is an instinctive form of expression. Children are bursting
with creativity, all they require is opportunity. We truly hope that
schools begin to provide these opportunities.
********************
Interview
with Ram Ganesh Kamatham
Playwright
and Theatre Director
Q 1: That an ADP would involve a dramaturg! A new idea....What was your engagement with the project?
Ram: I was involved only at the script level. I was
working pretty remotely for this particular production and rehearsal process. I
shared some of my ideas, tools and methodology with Arati at the very start of
the process, who then put them to work in her engagement with the
students.
Q
2: Could you tell me a little about how
you extracted a script from their ideas? Or, what was the process of developing
the script?
Ram: First off I chatted with Arati about how we
could get a sense of the preoccupations of these kids using some games. These
involved some games using memory and writing a few words about "what you
want to change in the world." In fact Arati went further and got them to
write about what themes they thought would make for a fun play. She managed to
extract some 35 themes from the kids which she sent me. They ranged from Greek
Gods to Bombay Blasts to Déjà vu to Cinderella turning evil (or a mash up
twisted fairy tales).
From
this group, we also got nine things that they wanted to change in the world
1. Poverty
2. Pollution
3. Politics
4. Poaching
5. Dirty Public Toilets
6. Terrorism
7. Lack of wide spread education
8. Age limits (kick them!)
9. Global Warming
So
at this point the net was pretty wide, but I was getting an instinctive sense
of what this group was thinking about and how aware they were. And they were
pretty aware!
I
also looked at the play texts that the students were studying which turned out
to be a mix of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Tom Stoppard. The Stoppard and some
of the themes that the students were talking about (a mash-up) prompted me to
suggest a non-linear narrative to Arati but at this stage we were not sure of
what we wanted to do.
Post-October
Arati came back with a really solid focused amount of material and a rough
outline which got me excited enough to junk some of my own writing work in
favour of this play! She also sent me a number of songs that she was interested
in working with for dance pieces, so those also influenced the writing. The
outline used a really interesting mix of the nine muses from Greek mythology to
tell the story of Aladdin being ditched by the genie for his arrogance. The
story of four role models are performed for Aladdin to bring him around. At the
outline stage it was a bit didactic, so my job was really to flesh it out into
a fun script that was not preachy.
So
in a daze of coffee drinking in October, I wrote the text in a week. And Arati
liked it. And the school management liked it. (But later on felt the need to
change some of the names in the play because they were a bit worried about the
satire, which is fair enough.)
As
for the writing itself, I think I focused on making the mix more organic by modernising
the Muses and stories. And found a way to dramatically accommodate 200
performers! And I dropped one story simply because I personally wasn't
convinced enough about the story. By this time Arati was already working with
the students, and she felt that many of them had training and some stage
experience, so we could really take risks with the depth and range of the
parts. So I did… And when I saw the show it was true! The students were
amazing, great energy and superb comic timing.
Q
3: What has your experience (if any)
been with other schools thus far?
Ram: I think schools (and colleges) that commission
original scripts with at least a 6 month plan are more interested in actual
creative engagement because the process is that much more organic and as a
result that much more intensive and rewarding. Schools that want you to come in
and knock together a play in a month or two are usually just fire-fighting and
it's not a happy experience for anyone.
Q
4: What were the challenges of using this
process? What do you feel were its successes? Is there anything you would do
differently the next time around?
Ram: The challenge is always balancing the
preoccupations of the group with your own preoccupations as an artist. If you
are too present it's easy to pull the group in your own direction and influence
them too heavily, and for the group that's the path to blinkers and boredom. If
you try to remove your 'self' from the group you become disconnected with the
group and that's the instant path to boredom for you! So it's a balancing act
of being present, but at the same time self-effacing, so there is a constant
play. The other challenge of course, is time - you need time!
The
successes were very much on Arati's side, since I was just working my craft!
The production had so many moving parts and elements, and she was on the ground
juggling it all. The thing I'd do differently was to give myself more time to
write - to take the script even deeper!
Q
5: Any last thoughts on the process, the
script and how the children used the script?
Ram: As with any creative process, asking the right
questions was far more important than looking for a 'correct answer'. So for
this play, since this group was very aware - the overall question was very
close to the question we were using to gauge awareness in the first place… It
was something like - "How do I change the world?" - and
that's a pretty big question! But you have to take on that question guns
blazing!
When
you work with students there is always a temptation to 'lower the bar' - so for
example, since this group also wanted to change 'politics' I felt that an
awareness of political ideologies was important. If you 'lower the bar', then
you'll be running away from the fact that by wanting to create this awareness,
you will first have to wrestle with and reveal your own political
preoccupations and contradictions. If you 'lower the bar' - you will either
over-simplify the political climate you are writing in, preach one ideology or
just skittishly avoid bringing up politics altogether. By simply refusing to
'lower the bar' there are some hilariously funny sequences of political satire
in what is essentially a children's play! And given that this is theatre and
not a pol. science class, you've addressed the group's need by enabling the
expression of this idea, and by leaving the idea open to interpretation the
students discover what they want to, on their own time, should they want to.
What
also really struck me about the performance was how inclusive it was. There was
space for song, dance, video, music and movement of all kinds - there was room
for Carnatic vocals, heavy metal, hip hop, politics, football, ancient Indian
history, Greek mythology - all in the same space. Too often some aesthetic
agenda is imposed on a performance (No Western influence! Serious theme!) and
then you can feel the lack of conviction from the performers. I felt the
performance that I saw, was a result of healthy mix of all the people involved,
students and artists alike - a great mix of provocation towards independent
thinking and just letting the students 'be'! And that worked like magic.
