Having been asked to prepare a plan of the staging and seating for Aesop, I took myself (got my driver to take me) off to Gomti Nagar 1, where we will be performing twice, so that I could do some measuring. I went into the auditorium there, where there was just one man painting a pillar, walked onto stage, and started pacing out the dimensions. Immediately a gentleman appeared, clearly wanting to know who I was and what I was doing. He was the stage manager, he told me, though not in English – I understood well enough, had rather hoped he might appear.
I introduced and explained myself; he understood well enough, and went off to find a tape measure. While he was doing that, another man appeared; the auditorium manager. He spoke good English, and once I had explained myself again, he co-opted the pillar painter to fetch some of the auditorium chairs, so that I could lay out the bare minimum, and calculate how many we would be able to seat; this information was required for a meeting with Geeta Kingdon Gandhi, the manager of the school – effectively the boss – next week.
The idea is to convert the staging from proscenium to arena. There will be a circular acting area, 12 metres in diameter, half on the stage, and half extending into the audience on the floor, and including the steps which run the width of the stage. The audience will fan out from the front half of the space. Not all that far from a Greek theatre, in fact (so particularly appropriate for Aesop) though without the raked audience which would assist so much with seeing and hearing. Every campus that I have visited in CMS has an almost identical auditorium: more or less an enormous school hall (hardly surprising for the biggest school in the world.) The stage is large, but with just a nod to a real theatre stage. There are curtains right enough, and some very rudimentary wings (which actually do virtually nothing to mask the backstage.) There is some stage lighting, of a kind with which I am very familiar, being pre-LED, with all colours available and operated remotely.
The auditorium is flat, which makes it extremely adaptable for all sorts of uses, but does not help to make a theatre. It holds a couple of thousand, I believe, but the people at the back… actually, three-quarters (at least) of the audience, can neither see nor hear. Except there is a huge video screen (in some of their auditoria, three huge video screens) across the back wall of the stage.
This makes all the spaces perfectly suitable for lectures, presentations, large-scale theatre events where the stage is filled… but not for straight theatre. I have been going on to anyone who will listen (the teachers in the workshop, mostly) that Drama needs to be on a human scale; I am all in favour of using technology in theatre, but only for artistic and theatrical effect, not as a vital prerequisite for allowing it to happen at all. If screens are on, we seem to be conditioned to look at them, and enormous screens heighten this effect. So we will be covering the screens up altogether, with a circular curtain.
Similarly, we are not having mikes. I suppose because of the size of the place – even the corridors are long and wide – they have become addicted to them (I still remember the Odyssey festival, where I discovered my Dhangadhi cast had to use mikes… three minutes before they went on. In particular, I really dislike those headset mikes which put a small black ball right in front of the actor’s mouth (except for musicals, when there is an audience to compete against.)
The sketch above is the result of my measurements; I produced a sketch there and then, which both managers were impressed with, then converted it to this slightly more considered version. I shall just have to see what reaction it gets from the management.
