Day 7

10th July 2019

Activities:

For today’s class, we were joined by Abhishek Majumdar, founder of Indian Ensemble and artistic director of the Bhasha Centre, for a session on narrative and form. We began the day with the questions: when does a Yakshagana play stop being a Yakshagana play? What is the essence of a form like Yakshagana? These questions yielded considerations that extended beyond the unique form of Yakshagana and grappled with form at large. Abhishek encouraged us to interrogate the forms that each of projects, consciously or subconsciously, had adopted, and whether these formal choices were decisions we wanted to make. He said that a good way to think about creating/innovating formally is by asking what formal choices you can make so that, if those formal choices were undone, your play would not exist.
We then began discussing time, which Abhishek described as the driving force of a play. He noted that any play is a treatment of time, and how space changes over time; and that the decision to use devices like mask or puppetry is secondary to defining the manner in which time progresses in a play. We noted the distinction between open time (where time jumps easily from past to present to future) and closed time (where time is clearly defined and does not jump); and open space (where large geographies are covered on one stage) and closed space (where space is more or less constant). We discussed how, by developing an understanding of the structures of time and space commonly employed by theatre-makers, we would be able to better address the matter of time and space in our plays. We also noted how the devices one chooses (masks, projections etc.) is independent from the formal structures one employs.
Then, taking our discussion of time further, we noted the existence of the different clocks in a play: the clock of the performance (how long the performance lasts), the clock of the scene (how long the scene lasts), and the clock of the character (how long the character exists) for example. We watched four excerpts from different plays set within hotels and, in groups, tried to determine what structures of time and space each one had employed, and how the play’s three clocks were treated. For example, in Lola Arias’ Hotel Maids, the performance is structured so that a spectator enters a hotel room and inside the room, they encounter the story of one of the many maids that work in the hotel. They can spend as much time as they want in a room before moving to the next, and each room is a distinct vignette; thus, because a spectator can spend as much time as they want in a room and could, arguably, spend all their time in that same room and never visit any of the others, the clock of the scene is left open.
After that, we discussed four different variants in the performance of the Ramayana and how they employ different structures of time and space, and different devices too, to tell the same story. We spoke about Ramnagar’s Ramlila, in which the performance stretches over one month and the audience is given a map of the town, the entirety of which is transformed into different settings for the play.
Then, Abhishek asked us to take thirty minutes to imagine a 2 person scene where one character has a secret that they don’t reveal to the other; and then, to write three versions of this scene and in each version, to employ a different structure of time. After presenting our scenes, we discussed each of our structural changes and why we chose to do what we did.

Questions considered:

What is inextricable from a particular form of theatre? What formal choices create the essence of a form of theatre, like Yakshagana? What can you subtract from a form without altering its essence?
What are the different ways in which plays treat time? What are the different ways in which plays treat space? How do your formal structures relate to the devices you employ on stage?
What are the different clocks running within a performance? How can you alter the structure of these clocks to create varied performances?