‘Can we create a natak on Cricket?’
‘How
about Beti Padhao Beti Bachao?’
‘Oh
we can perform on Ramayan?’
Working
on the issues of gender, sexuality and challenging violence with a right based
approach is quite challenging when it comes to engaging with the adolescents in
the village. That’s not because they don’t understand or violence is normalized
but also because of the aftermath of various incidents that make interactions
between girls and boys highly tabooed in the community as well as in the
schools. This also results in shutting down curiosity, creativity and out of
box thinking in ways that most of the people will find it difficult to
understand.
We
at Sahas are consistently trying to create safe sharing spaces for these
crucial topics both in Khushipura village as well as in the nearby schools. We
have been working with the students of CPS Public School, Kakrari Gaon since
last year on the various topics like Mental Health, Human rights and so on;
this time we took a leap and designed a workshop to explore the basics of
theatre of oppressed.
35+
boys and girls from different classes participated in the session. We began
with a fun energizer of ‘ladoo’ where one of the volunteer will say the
name of another student along with shouting ‘Ladoo’ – that person will sit down
quickly and the other two around them will yell ladoo to each other; the slower
one will be evicted. They took some time to warm up however the gender divide
in the group was quite visible.
We
then invited the participants to pair up with a student with whom they have
least interacted with in the school or who is in different class and they were
to share their name, hobby, their aspirations and one embarrassing moment.
After they know each other, they have to introduce themselves as their partner.
Few pairs enacted each other quite well, some were shy and some awkward. This
was followed by walking activity, they were meeting and greeting silently then
through sound, they also walked as instructed like an old person, teacher and
powerful person. What stayed with me was how girls had powerful stance while
acting as person in power. Here too, we saw girls walking through many spaces
while boys walked in only one part of the room clearly demarking the space
based on gender.
To
set the background for theatre/ rangmanch; we divided the
participants in 5 groups – 3 groups were all girls, 1 group was all boys and
one group challenged the gender barrier and formed mixed group. The facilitator
invited each group to think about the first theatre that was conceptualized by
human beings, who would have created it and what was the purpose behind it?
There was silence, then some slow murmurs and then hands were raised – ‘but how
would we know?’ ‘Ramayan was the first natak?’ ‘I don’t know – I haven’t read
it anywhere’ ‘I haven’t seen a natak in my life’ ‘How do we do acting?’ and lot
many questions came up. The facilitators went to each group, engaging and
hinting them as to what could have been the first theatre, motivating them to
use their creativity.
One
of the group decided to become early men/cave men who will go for hunting and
sharing the food with the rest of the people in their community, another group
after lot of discussion decided to showcase various activities an early men
would have engaged in, the boys group decided to act out a sports competition, another
group struggled to decide whether they want to even act or not; last and final
group decided to show a theatre on saving girl’s child.
It
was wonderful to see that the first group brought various props without even
our suggestions like a spear, grass and something to tie around their waist.
The second group went a
little ahead and did a natak on hunting with bow and arrow, spear and sharing
the food with the group. Since the boys were little reluctant and lesser in
number so one by one they went out of the class. Third group tried but couldn’t
clearly represent the girl child natak but their efforts were well appreciated.
The session closed with
the feeling circle, wherein the students were invited to share how did they
feel after engaging in the theatre, is there anything they learned during the
session?
‘It was interesting; I have
never done something like this. I would like to know more’
‘I enjoyed it but I don’t
know how to act. I was feeling shy.’
‘I had fun.’
‘I know other boys went
away, but I would definitely come in the next workshop. Thank you!’
While the participants
enjoyed learning basics of TOTO, it was also a learning experience for our
team. One being that we need to address the issues of gender, build
understanding on issues of adolescence while creating safe sharing space for
both boys and girls in this school and then go more slowly step by step for
learning theatre.
