New Delhi became the most polluted city in the world. As an Indian and a patriotic one, I couldn’t stand doing nothing about it. Every time i would fly back to my school in England that last thing I could see of my city was a thick blanket of harmful gasses that were suffocating us Indians.
After having done a physical Theatre piece, which is a Theatre that allows us to use actions instead of words to get across our message. In it we can use mimes, movements and gestures to explore complex and social issues. I felt using this in my production would be effective as i can show what pollution does to our organs without having to give an explanation verbally. Physical Theatre, also, must come from the actors itself and the actions should be very personal to them. Hence, I could not have pre decided ideas and actions but instead I had decided upon a structure of the production.
When i returned to Aarohan for this performance, I was over whelmed by how many more students wanted to pursue Drama. Instead of 5 i had 20 people in my classroom, ready to take on this production. However, the teacher advised me to stick to 5 as the rest had exams going on. Less said the better, but i lived with it.
As we got on with our discussion the students agreed to showcase 3 things that pollution does to our body and wanted to physically do it on stage. As a teacher it was my turn to do my homework now! Not having done Biology in my life, I looked up the effects of pollution on our health and read up on it. Next class was a boring but much needed one; I explained to them 5 things that happen inside our body due to pollution. The students then selected 3- which were blocking of the arteries in the heart, lung inflammation and deafness (due to noise pollution).
We then got to rehearsing and trying new ideas:
The above video is just one of the starting exercises we did everyday before beginning our rehearsals. This was a good way to get the boys to focus and also relax after having long days.
After having done the rehearsals we felt that the physical movements though self explanatory, do become a little too complex with the uninitiated. Therefore w decided to do flashcards. This introduced another Theatre form to our production: Epic Theatre. Created by none other than Bertold Brecht, Epic Theatre was based upon the ideology that an audience needed to know they were watching a play. Flashcards were an aspect of that Theatre. However, we all also agreed that the audience needed to distance themselves from any emotional evolvement and only take away our message about pollution.
Therefore, we came to the final production which you can view here:
Nimish Mehra 