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Theatre Workshop with Shilpi Marwaha
from BITACORA Vol. 3
17thMarch, 2018 Theatre Workshop with Ms. Shilpi Marwaha
On 17 March 2018, the English Literary Society organised a theatre workshop conducted by Ms. Shilpi Marwaha, theatre artist and activist from Sukhmanch Theatre. The workshop began with a warm-up round of ―Walk Around‖, where the students briskly walked, keeping off each other, in a zigzag pattern in a space that kept decreasing till everyone was crammed very close to each other. Through this exercise Ms. Marwaha discussed the participants observations and explained how less space for a team that co-exists meant more teamwork and vigilance. It also helped to understand how performance was about navigating time and space on stage.
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A second exercise required the participants choosing a partner to ―mirror‖ them, or walk on the stage guiding the other person, copying her actions and exchanging roles. This exercise helped to understand the need for trust among team members. This had a huge impact on most participants and helped them shed their inhibitions and understand how performance is not just about dialogues.
Post lunch, Ms. Marwaha divided the participants into groups and introduced Improvisations. Each group had to improvise a Panchatantra story with a modern twist. Stories like ‗The Blue Jackal‘, ‗The Crocodile and the Monkey‘, and more were performed impromptu and brought out the amateur actors in all the participants. This exercise helped develop a spontaneous sense of confidence in their acting abilities in a fun and informative manner; all the well-known tales were adapted to contemporary times using very few props. Each group‘s performance was then reviewed by both Ms. Marwaha and other participants which made it a truly interactive session. While the workshop helped most overcome their stage fright, others too found it a refreshing break from internal assessment submissions.
The workshop concluded with Ms. Marwaha giving a few tips on how to put together a production and was especially helpful to those part of the English Performance Club. The participants look forward to more such workshops conducted by Ms Marwaha and other theatre personalities.
