Friday, May 13, 2011

My Experience with Shakespeare and the others

It was a Monday morning. I was at my computer searching for some workshops on the net. I didn’t realize at that point of time how valuable that search was gonna be.
I found an interesting workshop which was starting on that day itself, so I wasn’t sure if there would be a seat for me. I called them up, luckily registration was still open. So I went to this school, shishuvan, where the workshop was supposed to start. And I registered myself.

So that’s how this wonderful journey began; an interesting, fun-filled, enlightening journey with through Shakespeare. The first day, I was a little nervous. In an hour the nervousness was gone. It didn’t feel like a classroom at all. It wasn’t like I was listening to Jaimini Pathak, the great director. It was like sitting with a group of friends over tea, discussing Shakespeare. Though it was still a classroom. I was still in a theatre workshop. It was Jaimini Pathak who was teaching us. Yet there was something sort of unusual in this whole thing. The atmosphere was different. He was not teaching us anything but he taught us so much: through the games that we played, the interpretation of the scenes, the times when we were giving feedback.

In the days that followed we played many games. Many of them didn’t seem important in the beginning. In fact, initially I thought some of them were kind of stupid. But as we played along I understood the significance and relevance of each game to theatre. And like Jaimini always said, “theatre is about doing stuff”; as we did play along we understood everything.

 My favorite game of all was the zip-zap game. In this game a group of people stand in a circle and imagine they have a 100 degrees burning hot iron ball. None of them can hold it for long. So they have to keep passing it quickly. Remember it’s not a real ball. Also, when they pass it to the person on their left they have to say “zap” and when on the right they have to say “zip”. And if a person gets a wrong signal, he/she drops the ball. In  this game we are doing multi-tasking: many things at the same time. We are imagining there is a burning hot iron ball, we are passing it to the other person, we are giving the signal to the person next to us, we are listening for the correct signal, we have to drop the ball incase of wrong signal is given and so on. This is basically an alertness game. An actor needs to be alert on stage. He has to listen to what his co-actors are saying, he may have to act as if he is doing some work, he may have to run/walk simultaneously, he has to remember when to speak his lines; all of these at the same time.
There are other cool games too, like the 1-30 game, the status game (in which a person has to change his body posture as his status/rank keeps changing during the scene), the ball-in the air- game. Each of these has its own significance and relevance to theatre.

We explored five different scenes from Shakespeare’s different plays. The first one that we did was a scene from Julius Caesar, in which he is being murdered. After reading and analyzing the scene we realized that this one particular scene could be interpreted in a zillion different ways. That is the beauty of Shakespeare. And that is why he is alive 500 years later. Our final interpretation of that scene was of a mafia gang. In that scene there is a roman empire, a ruler, a senate; none of that was there in our interpretation. In our scene we have the leader of a mafia gang (Caesar), and his gang members who conspire against him and kill him. But, mind you, we didn’t change a single word of what Shakespeare has written. We used the exact same words of dialog, but interpreted the scene and characterized it in our own way.
Then we did a scene from Macbeth. It is the scene in which Lady Macbeth is going crazy after murdering the king and many other people. She is imagining that there is a red spot of blood on her palm, which is the blood of Duncan, the king. She is sleep-walking, trying to get rid of an imaginary spot, she’s shouting on her husband, Macbeth (who isn’t actually there), then she is cursing the king, then she’s thinking about Banquo’s ghost. Through this scene, we learnt about multiple focuses and change of thought in theatre. There are external and internal focuses; we learnt how we show the audience that the focus is changing by changing our body posture. This scene also involves the gentlewoman and the doctor who are observing Lady Macbeth as she sleepwalks and says all that crap about banquo and Duncan and Macbeth.

Then there was the king Lear scene which I performed. It is scene in which he is really angry and on the verge of madness, this is because he has been thrown out of his own kingdom by his own daughters. There’s a storm going on and he is taking out his anger on the elements of nature. For this scene we had split into 3 groups. The other two groups (apart from mine) got some positive feedback and some negative feedback but when I performed everyone spontaneously said “awesome” at the same time (Excuse me if I am bragging here). That was a lot of encouragement and I felt really proud of myself, at least at that moment. This scene basically involves a high level of energy and anger. I just had to feel angry and go and shout. But what made it even more attractive apart from my dialog delivery, were the special effects that the other kids had done from behind. For getting the “stormy” effect one kid was switching on and off the lights (lightning), someone was running with a stole hovering in the air to get the “wind” effect, someone was making a “wind” sound”, someone was producing the rain sound from some clay balls, someone was producing thunder by banging the door in a particular manner. All these special effects really enhanced the performance and made the audience feel and see a storm. The best part was that we did all this without any “technician” or “special effects person”; we didn’t even get anything from outside, we just used whatever we had in our room.

We did another scene from Macbeth, which is the dagger scene. Macbeth is going to kill Duncan, the king. He is hallucinating. He sees a dagger which is not actually there. He starts talking to the dagger and then talks to himself and calms down. It is soliloquy. It is perhaps the most difficult to scene to understand out of all the scenes that we did. The language is intense. And there is a continual change in focus between external and internal, sometimes there is both external and internal. In that way, it is a very complex scene. Nevertheless, one of us was able to perform it. And she did a great job.

There was another scene that we did, but could not perform due to the time constraint. It was from “A midsummer night’s dream” a comedy. This is a scene that made me realize that Shakespeare can be hilarious if you open your eyes and let them explore. This scene is truly hilarious. It also teaches a lot about theatre indirectly. In the scene, a group of ordinary workers perform a play in front of their king, since they are not trained actors they do a really bad performance. There is a play inside a play. We had some great laughs while analyzing this scene. I also came to realize: Shakespeare can be fun; by the way this is not a pun. (hey, that rhymed!)

This was, in a nutshell, what we did in this awesome workshop.

Honestly, before this workshop, my attitude to Shakespeare was not a very welcoming one. The thought of Shakespeare would remind me of his uncanny, old language (thou…Thy…doth…thee...etc). But now that has suddenly changed. Because of this workshop I feel I have become capable of appreciating Shakespeare. It involved some work, some play and gradual widening of the intellectual horizon, especially as far as language is concerned.
Today’s performance marked the end of this beautiful experience we had together. I will miss those afternoons with Jaimini. I will miss those games, I will miss the friends that I made. Sure, tomorrow will be just the same. The sun will rise, the clock will hit two, but I won’t have the “Apna Shakespeare” group anymore.

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