The Festival of Drama and Dialogue, initiated 18 years ago by the students of Std XII of The School KFI, was born out of a need to interact with students of the same age from other schools in a non-competitive forum. They evolved certain criteria for the plays: an hour long, original or original adaptations, relate to youth realities, and pertain to current social problems.
The Process Behind How We Created Our Play:
We were encouraged to choose our own characters and build them. The plot and the play itself were evolved based on this. As a group we worked on several aspects of theatre and developed the script improvising all the time. This helped us understand ourselves, discover and learn about ourselves and also to learn to work together.
This year, 12 schools - RASA Foundation, PSBB Nungambakkam, PSBB KK Nagar, Good Earth, Vidya Sagar, Chennai H.S School, A.M.M, Olcott Mememorial, Avvai Home, Abacus Montessori, TI Matriculation and The School KFI - participated. The performances were spread over the first two days. Each day, after every three plays, a panel discussion was held, the panel consisting of teachers from different schools and a class XII student of The School. These discussions helped the audience learn how the plays were created and gave them a chance to question participants. Some issues and questions that come up during this discussion were—The way groups and peer exclusions happen in a school context, How drinking leads to ruination of a family, Can change happen in the absence of role models? Why do people get into difficult situations such as anorexia? What makes a child naughty? Too much or too little attention?
And similar questions…
The School's Play: When Logic Fails….
The theme of the play conceived of and played by the class XI students of The School was based on the following questions. These questions emerged from our experiences, explorations and were facilitated by our teacher, Smt. Sumitra M Gautama.
What do you do when you're bullied and you don't know why? What do you do when you don't know what choices to make in life? What do you do, when logic, fails? This is what The School's play was about. We addressed issues that were larger than our own realities. We explored the working of the corporate world and questioned the use of violence in struggles. Our stories have travelled a long way over the last month. The process behind the play is never complete. Thus our stories will continue to evolve…
Dialogue Day: The third day was a dialogue session where the relevance of the themes portrayed was discussed. This had two sessions: a panel discussion and an open house on the themes chosen and the connection that they had felt with these. Some other questions raised were —How were the themes that were portrayed in the plays relevant to society? How were the themes relevant to you as individuals? How did your choice of themes affect you? The second session was enriched by the guest speaker Dr. Ambika Kameshwar Founder-Director, RASA who talked about theatre's connection to life, and conducted many interesting activities with the students.
Bohnishika Ghosh, Mukund Bharadwaj and Hamsa Narasimhan
