Theatre Workshop @ SP

All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theatre, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man” - Bernard Berenson

In an effort channelized towards inculcating theatre as a form of education, SPJIMR conducted the first of its many theatre workshops lined up for the current year. A Thursday that was meant to catch up on a lot of lost sleep, since it’s the weekend here, was anything like a normal Thursday. Students dropped their respective management hats to don roles totally outside their character.
So how and why did this happen? SPJIMR truly believes in the holistic concept of management with the extra stress always being on non-classroom learning. Students over the years have realized that this is truly one form of learning that makes you experience what you are supposed to learn, thereby ensuring that the learning stays within you for far longer than it would if it was just done through books.
The workshop was primarily designed to give everyone involved in the theatre group a feel of what theatre is all about. What goes into the making of a play behind what finally comes live on stage one fine evening was something that intrigued a lot of the participants, and the workshop was meant to clarify just that. What the workshop also succeeded in doing was to successfully squeeze out the acting juices of the participants in the limited time available.
With a facilitator as enthusiastic and power packed as Ms. Yuki Ellias, who came down to conduct the workshop, there was no letting go of the energy infused in each one of the participants. With these perfect ingredients in place, the workshop truly had the makings of a blockbuster and it certainly did not disappoint. It kicked off with some basic exercises to warm up the crowd (almost literally), before people actually got down to seeing and experiencing the various nuances of theatre in its larger sphere.
One of the most prominent exercises which left an indelible mark on the participants was the one in which we were asked to use our hips, shoulders, nose, knees and any other part of our body apart from our legs to walk. Interesting ain’t it? Things got more crazy when a simple expression of a smile or a frown was magnified as it passed on from one person to the other, thereby exposing to people, how much of a story can be conveyed through often under-estimated expressions.
There was more to come though. The most enjoyable part of the workshop truly followed in the 2nd half by which time, most of these first time actors were starting to find their rhythm and character. We were transformed into clowns, were given jazzy attire to play with, and were asked to entertain the crowd for a good ten minutes each as a group. . What seemed a rather straight forward fun exercise actually involved the most learning. The instructor intervened in each performance and started asking them random questions and through this intervention taught everyone present about the different types of clowns and how the best in every clown comes about when the clown is cornered and it’s this desperation that moulds the clown into the performer.
The icing on the cake though was the finale exercise where a visual space was created right there in front of our eyes. We designed an illusionary stage depicting a club with a fancy reception, a swimming pool, changing rooms, showers and et al. Artists were picked up and were asked to play a game as simple as “Chor-police” in the space that was created, thereby increasing stage awareness and self-consciousness while on stage. What was exhilarating to say the least was to see, how this exercise was repeated in 1/10th the space keeping everything else the same. The exercise truly emerged as being one that exposed artists to creativity and innovation with the limited resources and constraints available, something that most often is the case with stage performances.
Some of the biggest takeaways from the workshop included the amount of freedom that artists possessed as individuals, the teamwork that goes into the making of a production, confirming the fact that no individual was greater than the process for which we had gathered.Participants left the place feeling more rejuvenated having touch sides of themselves that they had never known existed within them. The workshop served its overall objective and with the kind of feedback it received, will ensure to be just a start of many more to come in the months ahead.

-Ajay Simha

-Abhinay N

GASPians

PGDM 2008-10