Day 15

22nd July 2019

Activities:

1. We spent the day workshopping Shatarupa’s play, which interrogates caste and gender politics in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Debi Choudhurani. Unlike our last two workshops, where we used improvisation to explore the different possibilities within each scene, this time, we engaged the source text directly to see the ways in which we can adapt parts of the story for the stage.
2. We began by reading two chapters from the novel, and then broke up into two groups of three. We were asked to parse through the same two chapters and identify all the major shifts and turns in them, and also to note the three most significant events that propel the story forward. Then, with this information, we were told to produce a skit that depicted these three events, as well as employed the following: a piece of music that is unexpected, a surprise entry, interaction with the audience, the repetition of an image or an idea, and three lines lifted directly from the text.
3. After our performances, we discussed how these different interpretations of two chapters of Bankim’s novel can inform the ways in which Shatarupa’s characters engage with the novel too. (In her play, a group of college students decide to adapt the novel for the stage.) We noted that, given the large social and cultural gap between Bankim’s world and contemporary India, the novel, in adaptation, is prone to the genres of comedy and satire.
4. Then, in the same groups, we were asked to produce three tableaus that depicted the same three major events from our skit, and to make images that were striking and showed a progression of the story or of an idea. We presented our tableaus and, again, discussed how these images could be incorporated into the play.

Questions considered:

1. How much liberty can one take with their source text, or material that one is adapting?
2. What role does image-making play in writing text? How can a playwright maintain a clear focus on both crafting strong visual cues as well as conveying information through dialogue?