Guerilla Functionary # 1: Tarantismo Dance Company

(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.