First Endeavour

They say pictures say a 1000 words. So before writing an essay and boring you all, take a look for yourself.

There is a non-profit organisation in New Delhi, which goes by the name Aarohan. It provides extra classes to those students who wouldn’t be able to afford them otherwise. I volunteered to work here to teach whoever wished to learn about Theatre. The first class I got was of 5 teenagers who are bursting with enthusiasm. It was their first time learning this art, and it was my first time teaching it.

So what was my first production about? Dengue. A disease which is caused when Aedes aegypti, a mosquito, bites a person. This mosquito has affected almost 20,000 Indians per year, according to the The Union Health Ministry. When research was conducted by scientists, they found that these mosquitos breed in water and tend to be most dangerous during our Monsoons, also known as our rainy season. Coincidentally the time I started going to Aarohan was in the monsoon season; hence, i wrote a play around this deadly disease. It was called “Let’s Trace It”. It was about a boy whose mother had this disease and was spending all his hard earned money trying to save her life. The point of the production was to inform the audience of this horrible disease and how it can weigh down on our pockets.Thus, i added a role for a doctor to educate the people in the audience of this disease and also how to prevent it. To get the right audience for this information to have effect upon i decided to do a street play.

I had written the script. I had the audience. One more thing i needed was which drama style did i want to pursue- Brecht’s Epic Theatre, Artaud’s Theatre Of Cruelty or Stanislavsky’s Method Acting/ Realism. To get this answer I relied on my students; i waited to hear what they have to say about the script and about the characters. From that i unearthed that they wanted the story to be as realistic as possible to get the audience to sympathise with the dying mother and the struggling son. Therefore, we decided to go with Stanislavsky.

I introduced them to go the concepts of Method Acting like emotional memory, relaxation and the “what if” scenario. I limited us to those as i didm;t want to confuse or burden them with the rest of Stanislavsky’s methods. Here we are during the rehearsal period: