The Surprise Package

In my last post I had spoken about how I wanted to give more time to developing theatre sessions for children. Funnily enough, I have now been put in charge of coordinating a project involving a mainstream school. So not only will I have to supervise the project and give regular reports to Sanved, I will also get the chance to work intensively with children and conceptualize a programme involving them. Needless to say, I am very excited about this. I’ve been looking up some books on doing theatre for children and have also talked in depth with my co-trainers at Sanved regarding formulating sessions. A couple of months ago they had been enrolled in a 14-day course in dance movement therapy and one of the areas of focus was working with children. As a result, their own expertise in planning sessions for children has increased and all of us (who are involved in the project) are looking forward to working together.

But going back to the project in question. A few months ago, one of my all-time favourite school teachers, Anjana Saha, had contacted me and asked me if I was interested in doing drama classes for a new school she had become the principal of. The school in question was Shaw Public School and is located in Behala. I told her about my commitments to Sanved and The Cambridge School and, to cut a long story short, she became very interested in the work I was doing with Sanved. She asked me if Sanved would be able to conduct classes at her school – classes which could bring together dance, movement and theatre components. Sohini di (Sohini Chakraborty, the director of Sanved) and I met her a few weeks ago and starting from March 16th, we will be taking regular classes at her school. Our immediate project will be choreographing a performance involving the whole school (nearly 600 children!) for their Founder’s Day programme in early April. Apart from me, there are 3 other trainers from Sanved; we have met the children and come up with a concept for the programme. In the next week, I will have to develop a costume design and also a tentative stage design plan. I’ve never worked with so many children before, but somehow, I feel that many of the questions I had regarding conceptualizing theatre classes with children will be answered in this process.

Visiting Shaw Public School was in itself a wonderful experience. The school has large, child-friendly grounds, the classrooms are very airy and well-planned. It’s incredibly heartening to see so many new schools coming up in the city that are in tune to children’s needs. When I was growing up, there were only a handful of “reputed schools”. But now, thanks to the mushrooming of several new schools that offer excellent infrastructure and teachers, parents have many more choices. So the traditionally deemed “good schools” have a number of equally good, if not better, counterparts. I think that’s one thing Calcutta can be proud of (!).

All in all, the past couple of months have seen my internship take an unexpected but perhaps even more exciting turn. When I joined Sanved I thought I’d be working largely with disadvantaged young girls and women (which I was doing and will continue to do so). I did not think I’d also work with mainstream children and feel equally challenged and engaged, even if it's a different kind of engagement and the needs that should be addressed are different. But, undoubtedly, the best part of this is that even if I'm eight months into my internship, I can still hope to enter territories untouched upon so far. There really is no greater pleasure (for me, at any rate).