Day 2

16th May 2019

Activities:

We began the day with a conversation on filmmaker and academic Lata Mani’s notion of archives; Mani believes in the practice of maintaining growing archives for each of her projects. She charts its origins and the evolution of her ideas by keeping copies of articles, journal entries of relevant lived experiences, images, films, and so forth that impact her project in tangible ways. In relation to this, participants were told to look for five central texts that would form the foundation of their project, and to bring these in and present them on Monday.
Then, we read “The Bath,” a short story by Raymond Carver, from his collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” The story is about a boy’s hospitalization on his birthday, and how his parents respond to this tragedy. We broke off into groups of three and mind-mapped the different dimensions of this story. Each group identified the story’s driving metaphors, its premise, perspectives, context, and so forth, and shared our analysis with the rest of the lab.
After that, still in our groups, we were asked to devise an adaption of this story within three parameters: the adaptation had to be three scenes long, include ten intentional seconds of silence, and incorporate a surprising element that altered the space our performance occupied. Each group worked together and performed short, ten-minute adaptations of “The Bath.” At the end of this, we discussed the challenges and advantages of adapting an existing text.
Then, we spent the rest of the afternoon reading Andha Yug by Dharamvir Bharti (translated by Alok Bhalla) aloud.

Questions considered:

What distinguishes drama from other literary forms? Why are you writing drama? Why are you writing for the stage and not for another dramatic medium?
What questions is your project asking? What questions is your project answering?
What is in the archive of your project? What other sources of information (text, image, video, etc.) is your project in conversation with? How has your understanding of the project’s themes and subjects changed over time?
What are the opportunities and the challenges in adapting texts (e.g., a short story) for the stage? How do you find accurate visual representations of the images in texts? What are the key portions of a text that must be translated onto the stage? What can be omitted?