Drama with children: a journey of discovery
Nidhi Qazi
This piece has been long pending. Pending I say, one, because of the habit of procrastinating anything till no end, and two, because of the wait for that moment of sheer passion and will which would guide this piece of writing.
A bit about me first. I work with children in drama in education and it’s been a journey of only a few months so far and there is a long way to go, to study, to engage deeply and lay a roadmap for myself and the children.
So yes, I work with two groups of children – One, the students of an elite English-medium school in Delhi, two, a group of children who are part of an NGO in Noida. While the former setting has me working in accordance with the school and a full-fledged team of drama instructors and coordinators, the latter setting gives me an upper-hand and is a freewheeling arrangement where the children and I are the sole decision-makers. These statements may look like comparisons but I do not intend to make any. These differences aside, the essence of the work done with all the children is the way the drama class has been approached. This approach has nothing to do with what I as a child experienced in a drama class a decade ago; it does away with the ‘read-rote-reproduce’ approach. Here, the process is not that of teacher giving out an alien script to children, asking them to memorize the dialogues and then rehearse without children making much sense of what’s going on. It is a complete shift.
So what exactly has this shift been, and what have we arrived at so far?
To understand the process and experience better, let us first simply understand what drama is. In our work so far, be it doing basic drama games or creating scenes or bigger acts, children and the drama facilitator have been collaboratively taking part in the process of thinking, responding, reasoning, and reflecting.
Let me tell you a story. This was with the second group of children, aged between 13 and 16 years. It had been just two months of inconsistent drama sessions with them. Coming up soon was the Annual Day where this group had to present a play. We all brainstormed together. The first step was to decide on a theme. After lots of suggestions, we unanimously decided on the theme – a human being is nothing but a puppet. The next step was to ask the children to think of situations where we humans behave like puppets. Having come up with a few situations, they were then asked to write in groups or individually, the scripts for the situations to be enacted. Each of these scripts was discussed, argued, and critiqued in the larger group and then finalized. One thing made very clear before the discussion was that the critique would have to be backed by logic; one cannot simply discard the script because it doesn’t feel right. Another thing was to suspend our judgments and instead respect what the other child has written. That is, if a child has created a certain situation depicting how a human being behaves like a puppet, others cannot discard it simply by saying that such a situation is not possible based on their own worldview.
So here are the situations the children came up with:
- The entire narrative of the play is a conversation between a human being and a puppet where the latter is mocking the human of being one of her kind. The puppet is trying to help the human understand through various situations how he behaves like a puppet in various situations. Lastly, the human seeks a solution to help him not behave like a puppet.
- A group of friends is missing their friend Mithilesh who has not been coming to play. The reason? Mithilesh’s nasty neighbour complained to his mother that her son is getting spoilt playing with girls. The mother believes the neighbour and asks Mithilesh not to play. The son obeys her.
- Ashish is unwell and is suffering from cold and cough. He goes to see a doctor, accompanied by his friend Ankur. The doctor hurriedly prescribes antibiotics and expensive tests. Ankur wants to question the doctor, but he quietly lets Ashish do as he is told. The test reports show nothing and Ankur realizes that he should have got Ashish to go for a second opinion instead of blindly following the doctor’s orders.
- Kajal is a daughter in a traditional patriarchal family, where her elder brother wields power and authority over her and the mother. It is on his orders that Kajal has stopped playing outside and sits at home. Some years later, Kajal has become miserable, lacks confidence, doesn’t have friends and is lonely thanks to her brother.
- The last situation is a solution for the problem. It is a text taken from the story book Kyun Kyun Ladki published by Tulika Books. This is the story of Moyna, who hails from a tribal village and is aware of her socio-economic situation and keeps questioning it. Her situation is a reflection of the bigger issues of exploitation faced by the marginalized.
All the above situations (except the last one) were thought of by the children. A very important part of helping them think of situations was to direct them to think of situations that they have experienced personally or seen closely. This made the seemingly difficult task of ‘script-writing’ a smoother one. I say seemingly difficult because we adults believe that we are thinking individuals, superior to children who ‘may find writing a script difficult’. Whereas, what is actually difficult for us adults is to accept that children can think, reason, and reflect and do much more if they are provided with adequate space, time, and an autonomous environment.
The above story reinforces that drama means co-creating, it’s a step of thought in action wherein children are thinking and creating their own scripts and finally a medium of interaction between two contexts where they are using their experiences to create situations needed for the scenes.
In the above process, the next steps were those of finalizing the characters, finding appropriate actors, acting out the script and working on the stage design and movement; all of which were improvised back and forth as we went along.
Here’s another story: The children of class four and five of the private school had been given various texts as part of a three-session plan. Based on these texts, they were to design costumes for any one character of their choice, in groups. The costume designing had to keep in mind the various points that emerged from a brief discussion on the relationship between costumes and characters, done with the children as a pre-task.
From the points emerged the character sketches of the character whose costume was to be designed. One important thing which was stressed repeatedly was that the costumes should convey the points agreed upon clearly and that children could do their extra bit by researching about the general ways of living, cultural backgrounds for their characters. In the subsequent sessions, children were busy bringing together mostly waste materials such as old tattered clothes, newspapers, ribbons, etc., and figuring out various styles which could be part of the final costume.
The last session saw children presenting their chosen character. The presentations were a mix of questioning and discussing what the costumes wanted to convey and what they actually conveyed. The discussion also saw the presenter team defending their choice of costume or certain elements of it, and the rest of the class arguing against it. There were as many disagreements as there were agreements.
So for example, one group designed a costume for this poor, old man from Rajasthan, which was a character in the story, The Magic Bowl. To the first few questions such as where do you think this man belongs from, his age, both the presenter team and the children agreed that this man belonged to Rajasthan and was old – the markers being the turban, dhoti, and a walking stick and spectacles. To the question of his financial background, while the children said he looked like he belonged to the middle class, the presenters said he was from a poor background. To this, one of the children disagreed as the costumes ‘didn’t look shabby; they were clean and nicely ironed’. To this another child said that it was not necessary that poor people only wear shabby-looking clothes, they too can wear clean clothes.
What are these two stories telling us? Take your guesses.
Having slightly opened a window to the world of a drama class for the reader, from here on, I hope for myself and the children, that together we can realize our self-expressions better and explore the world of drama and dreams to its fullest potential.
More stories and experiences in the offing. Till then, wish me all the best!
The author is drama instructor, Heritage School, Vasant Kunj, as part of the Drama-in-Schools Programme by Theatre Professionals. She can be reached at qazi.nidhi@gmail.com.