Day 10

25th May 2019

Activities:

1. We started with a short writing exercise, where we were given a minute to write down one goal we wanted to accomplish in the coming week and an obstacle to its completion. Then, we were given another minute to write down one goal we wanted to accomplish in the coming year and an obstacle. Then, we were given another minute to write down one goal we wanted to accomplish before the end of our lives and an obstacle. Then, each of us shared our goals and our obstacles with the group, and we discussed which goals were driven by strong desire and which were not. We spoke about desire as a crucial aspect of playwriting, and how desire dictates the choices our characters make. We discussed the importance of obstacles, or conflict, in plays too.
2. For homework, we’d been asked to write the opening scene for our plays. We read out our scenes and the group discussed them, touching upon what worked and what didn’t, and what possibilities this scene had opened up for the play to pursue.
3. After this, we went to the Bangalore International Centre, where we attended a talk, by V.N. Rao, on the concept of the author in Indian text culture. Professor Rao delivered a wonderful lecture in which he argued that, with epic Indian texts like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the author does not write the text, rather the text writes the author. He also drew a fascinating distinction between recorded text (the manuscript as it is written) and received text (the manuscript as it is perceived and consumed by readers and listeners). At the end of his talk, Prof. Rao was in conversation with Professor Arshia Sattar, and they discussed, amongst other things, the differences between popular culture surrounding the Ramayana, and popular culture surrounding the Mahabharata.

Questions considered:

1. What drives your characters? What do they desire, and how does this desire influence the choices they make? How do you characters view the world? What do they believe in?
2. What obstacles is your character trying to overcome? Are these obstacles internal (e.g., anxiety) or external (e.g., climate change)?
3. What is the context for the play? What is the world these characters are inhabiting? Is it like ours? What’s the same and what is different?
4. What is the source of a character’s power, or lack thereof? How does a character wield their power?
5. To what degree is an author present in their body of work? Should the author omit themselves from their own writing? Can writing create an image of the person that wrote it?