In the Idea Development Lab's first term, participants familiarize themselves with the interconnected processes of research and ideation. Before beginning work on writing plays, participants are introduced to research practices and modes of critical thinking from various academic fields, which serve as valuable tools in creating for the stage. We begin by asking our participants: … Continue reading Term One Brief →

15th May, 2019Day 1 Activities: We began the day with a series of writing exercises. First, we were told to write for a period of five minutes and to begin each new sentence with the words “I remember.” We discussed the different memories each of us remembered and reflected on the act of looking back. … Continue reading Following the Lab: Day 1 →

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, … Continue reading Day 2 →

17th May 2019 Activities: We began our session with a conversation about the intersection of art and academia. Since all our projects engage with social, cultural, political, and economic matters, we discussed the need to inform our projects with research.We discussed Carver’s story, “The Bath,” again, and tried to pin down its premise, which is … Continue reading Day 3 →

18th May 2019 Activities: Today was our first guest lecture. Professor Sitharamam Kakarala teaches Law and Justice at Azim Premji University, and has had a long and illustrious academic career in this field. He began by showing us a video clip of an interview with physicist Richard Feynman, where Feynman was asked to explain why … Continue reading Day 4 →

20th May 2019 Activities: We began the day by comparing our responses to a homework assignment. We had been asked to answer the following question: what distinguishes a story from a situation? Chanakya produced selections, each of which made a claim about what a story is, from our written responses, and we were asked to … Continue reading Day 5 →

21st May 2019 Activities: We began the day with an exercise on the different steps involved in the research process, which we noted to be: identification of a problem, developing a testable theory (hypothesis) from observations, charting the implications of this theory, testing this hypothesis, and, finally, rejecting/refining hypotheses. We discussed each step and the … Continue reading Day 6 →

22nd May 2019 Activities: Today, we were joined by Sundar Sarukkai, a renowned professor of philosophy. He delivered a guest lecture that pushed the lab to think deeply about the big picture conflicts—or problems—that our projects are grappling with. He introduced the idea that, rather than pouring through long academic texts on moral and ethical … Continue reading Day 7 →

23rd May 2019 Activities: Today, we visited the National Gallery of Modern Art. We met with a curator who told us about the different exhibits on display at the museum, a brief history of modern art in India, and the ways in which we should attempt interpreting the works. Before coming to NGMA, we were … Continue reading Day 8 →

24th May 2019 Activities: We began the day with a presentation on oral histories. Chanakya spoke to us about different playwrights, writers, and academics that employed oral histories in their work. We watched part of an interview with Urvashi Butalia, a writer who collected oral histories about the partition, where she discussed her motivations and … Continue reading Day 9 →