The title is mine, I’m afraid, pitched at CMS’s fondness for mysterious titles in foreign languages, but it describes the premise well enough: taking students from different parts of India and Nepal, trying to forge them into a cohesive theatrical troupe, and then to put on a production- beginning at the start of the festival, ending with a performance at the closing ceremony, just four days later. The relatively familiar format of a play in a week… only less than a week, and working with a group of students I had never met, to put on a production in one of the cavernous auditoria that each campus at CMS possesses. No small task, then.
I was aware that there was always a possibility of confusion in the arrangements for such a venture – this was a new sort of project for Odyssey. And such problems were always more likely on the very first day, with students arriving from all over the country. And so it proved, The idea had always been to have one student from each of the participating schools, making a potentially huge cast. Having received some hint of this a few weeks ago , I had already reduced the size of the cast of the play I had written for the purpose., but even so, not enough students from other schools had volunteered. At this point, presumably so as not to disappoint me, CMS decided to pad out the numbers with a group of students from RJPM, Odyssey’s hosting campus. And it was about twenty of these that I met on the first morning. Unfortunately, there were too many of them, and for the most part they were too young. But at least I had definite numbers to work with now, so we kept just eight, enough to bring the total up to the total number required: 22.
Only four of the outside “ambassadors” had arrived by the time I gave the introductory workshop, so it was seriously unbalanced: four mature sixteen year olds, alongside a crowd of eleven to fourteen year olds, but fortunately they were very good about it. I used some basic exercises from my repertoire, and everyone did seem to enjoy it (even if a few of the CMS students had done exactly the same last year.
To take the positives. The four ambassadors were all great, and each one assured me they had volunteered for this. And I have been able to select the more confident members of the RJPM contnigent. So already, inevitably, I have begin to cast people in particular roles. Seems like a familiar theme.
