Let’s Watch!!

The stage was set,

The lights in place,

The audience were seated,

The actors waited.

Don’t worry, my dear reader, I am not going to write down sentences that rhyme, call it poetry, add it as my blog post and slap it in your face. All I want to do here is to recollect the entire sea of emotions that I swam through on the day I took my first steps towards being a contributing part of theater.

It was a small, seemingly insignificant mail, that changed it all. Well, the theater group (Yours Truly), that I am a part of, specializes in what is commonly known as improvisational theater. As the name suggests, it includes various forms of unscripted performances that require the mere skills of spontaneity and courage. Courage to break out from all the inhibitions that we might have imposed on ourselves and the spontaneity to act at will. At the very core of this version of theatrics is “Playback Theater“.So getting back to my story, I was informed through a mail (that I had skipped reading initially) that I would be a part of the Playback Team and would be performing on World Theater Day.

Cool. That was my first thought. Oh F********ck!!. That was the second. Playback ? Seriously ? I have no freaking experience!! What am I going to do ? Trying my best not to give in to these negative thoughts I decided to go for the rehearsals. What made it tougher was that we were to have only two days for learning the craft.

Anyway, despite all the efforts put in by the demons in my head, I went to ALMA. I should tell you now, ALMA is our studio, where all the rehearsals and workshops are conducted. Usually when I climb up the stairs, I can hear laughter, screaming, music and a lot of other indications that a huge ball of energy is just waiting to burst out inside Alma. But on this day (one day before the performance), I could not hear or see anyone. It was all quiet, none of the other team members had reached by then. This was fodder to those demons I had been fighting.”Run”, they said, “No one is here. Why do you have to bother ?” But I sat. I sat and I waited. Slowly, All of the actors started pouring in.

As we stood and stitched a story together about a man with a big moustache and the bugs living inside it, I forgot all about my worries. We gradually progressed to acting out the whole story that had just been given shape out of thin air. Without realizing, I glided through characters with ease. I was the man with the moustache one minute, and in the very next the melodramatic bug that had just been exposed while taking a shower (because her curtain i.e a strand of hair in the man’s moustache, had been plucked away). Without my knowledge a little confidence started seeping in. We progressed to expressing without the use of words. We are so used to being dependent on our words that getting robbed of them makes it difficult to render justice to any emotion. We closed our yes, tied our hands behind our backs, sat in a circle, and just made sounds that came from the heart. It took a while to realise how this simple activity was actually transforming our minds to think beyond the obvious, to break the moulds of conformity.

Exhausted and tired, I went back home, eagerly waiting for the hands of the clock to double up their pace and bring in the next day and with it another round of rehearsals, another set of stories, another bundle of emotions. The next day held a treat for us. We were honoured to witness a playback performance, put together only for the new “actors” by the stalwarts of the arts. It was the most humbling, awe inspiring experience. It gave me a sense of direction, something to aspire to. The moments there after, turned into minutes and hours without anyone realising. It was as if someone had put us all in a time machine, zipped through the whole day and threw us on the stage just in time for our performance.

The six of us sitting in the wings, our heartbeats in sync, waited with bated breaths for our turn to come. One after the other the acts were put up.  One after the other, applause was heard. One after the other, we breathed a sigh of relief. One after the other, we realised the initial panic was replaced by the urgency to go on stage and perform. It was as if, the audience and the actors were all riding the same brain wave. The immense energy that was floating around in that room made it impossible to curb the desire to improvise, innovate and in the process, touch some emotional chords. Comedy on the spot is a tough thing to achieve, but we tried. There was comedy that was there for the audience to enjoy and an undercurrent that was rushing through the minds of the actors. The irony of the situation was not lost on us, when we had to enact the story of a non-kannada speaking guy stuck in a kannada language play, and the actor chosen by the “story-teller” suffered the same predicament. 

Among the lights, the curtains and a lively audience, we completed our first Playback performance.

Few fumbles we made,

Some sweat we shed,

Many masks we wore,

As our boundaries we tore.