Every year you think summer camps have left no stone unturned, but there are a host of new options the following summer, yet again.
This year has been no different, from the early buzz created by various summer camps, to seeing them pan out in every suburb of Bangalore, leading to a lot of options to pick from.
However, there is a place, when you want to close your eyes, pick one and hope that that will be the best. For the 9th year, Ranga Shankara’s Summer Express arrived, prompt and with its wagons packed with variety.
The workshop series started with theatre, puppetry by veterans and moved on to exciting additions such as Montage Creation, Miniature Theatre, Photography, Cooking, Dance & Movement and Story Telling. The last workshop of the series, Object Theatre by Choiti Ghosh of Tram Theatre, was one of the new additions .
Choiti’s exposure to theatre started with her grandfather’s Jathra company. She assisted her father, Ashish Ghosh, in theatre for children, was with Katkatha puppetry troupe and with Habib Tanvir, before she took to Object Theatre.
Object Theatre, is it a type of puppetry or visual art? Automatons or machines? In Choiti’s words, “When an object is the protagonist and not a prop in theatre, it is Object Theatre.” The object is not subordinate to a human and does not come alive in Object theatre.
In the workshop, there was what looked like a coffee table, a collection of specific and vague objects, a group of children presenting around it and the rest of the children playing audience.
The group arranged the objects in a sequence of formations. Without much fuss, the audience guessed that it was ‘The Princess and the Pea” being presented.
And then it was feedback time, ranging from an honest “I don’t understand anything” to “You were not using center stage enough”.
The children were then re-divided into new groups and they started working on a script for the next day. While one group had dramatic narrations of their ideas to rest of the group, another group had everyone writing intently. The body language of the children assuming different roles was worth a moment of quiet observation. One of them even had a black round hat that he kept adjustinglike a director, intentional or unintentional!
There were two important take homes aimed at by Choiti, among other intangibles. One was the capacity to look at things through an eye of possibility and the other to be able to tell a non-verbal original story without specific objects. he feedback session and the group work is testimony to the learning quotient .
This also applied to Jyotsna Rao’s workshop ‘Make a Move’, where the children were taught basics of movement. trained in Kalaripayittu, Ballet, Bharathnatyam and Contemporary dance forms from Attakalari, Jyotsna introduced the children to a rich movement vocabulary. For those who missed Summer Express, you could check out The AHA! Theatre for Children, that usually happens in July. Summer Express at Ranga Shankara is usually scheduled in the months of April and May every year.
The workshops are open for registration as early as March. Be sure to be an early bird next year.
