Let’s learn theatre together!

 ‘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.