The Stage School Project

My expectation had been that my focus would be on the CMS Odyssey project first, and only when that was done would I be able to give my attention to the Ami9ty projects.  But it is clear that Rohit and the rest of his team are keen to make some progress with at least one of these projects as soon as possible… and actually this suits me fine.  While I am here, I want to use the time productively, and nothing starts with CMS until Monday.  With the result that on the Sunday, I spent the afternoon interviewing potential candidates for the Ehsaaz community project, the production of The Tempest.  Actually, if my journey from England had gone more smoothly, I would have been going through the same process on Saturday as well, but Air India had other plans for me then.

The interviews took place at a strange and rather lovely location: a private family house which has given over the lounge and garden to their artist daughter, who creates and teaches pottery there, but who has also offered us the use of either space not just for this weekend, but for rehearsals as well.  We conducted the interviews in the living room, furniture pushed back to create some space.

Though it took some while to get started, and even then people drifted in throughout the afternoon.  This was not just India’s relaxed attitude to time, but reflected the very real problem people had in getting there, since all of them have other things going on in their lives.  The process was a little unusual for me, being more like a series of job interviews than an audition (though each person did also deliver a short monologue, or in a couple of cases sing a song.  I asked some pretty generic questions – reasons for coming, previous experience, that sort of thing.  In the end, we worked our way through about a dozen candidates, and on the whole, it was reassuring, with some very strong candidates (alongside one or two who struggled with confidence, volume, etc.)

I had missed some people from the day before, of course, and Ehsaaz are still recruiting (Kubar in particular has been busy guerrilla-posting copies of the poster all over the city, even on the backs of unsuspecting tuk-tuks.)

But we have begun.  And already, in my mind, I have started to assign people to roles.  Inevitable, really.