Youth Skill Development

Today was Day one of my two day involvement with Amity University, Lucknow – I don’t know if this is THE university of the city, or one of two, or more, or where it ranks in the league table.  So far as I was concerned, I was now teaching in Higher Education, and that is beyond anything I have ever been asked to do before.  Which ought to have brought with it its own concerns, its own nervousness.  But actually, this was not the case.  Is this the same person who could not eat, sit, settle to anything before going off to teach, to direct, almost any comparable activity.  I do seem to be calmer now, have actually and actively looked forward to lessons, rehearsals, workshops here.

I was collected by a driver and two students, which anywhere else would seem like overkill, but is pretty much normal here, and taken to the other side of the city, which I had never visited, so far as I knew.  The huge and impressive building I had definitely not seen; we were driven to a side gate, taken to a back building, which sounds like a comedown but it was almost equally huge and impressive, met by Rohit at the doors, set into a grand portico, and conducted to the admin office of the Arts department.  This was indeed in the basement, but that was expected and not unwelcome; subversive things can happen out of sight.

There I was introduced to Prof (Dr) Kum Kum Ray, the Director of ASLL (I don’t think I know exactly, but Arts, Literature?  No! Amity School of Languages!) She was most welcoming, obviously knew all about me – or all that I had shared – and clearly understood the advantages of my position, as a retired volunteer, the freedom it gave me to please myself, as well as the range of experience I was able to bring.  She was my age, more or less, and it would have been good to chat more, for she had some fascinating anecdotes, about Dr Jagnesh Gandhi, Geeta’s father and the founder of CMS, from his earliest days.

And then the workshop.  There were the normal (Indian) preliminaries: welcoming speeches, photos, a recounting of my CV (though what everyone made of the fact that I had written a play called Jack In The Box I have no idea.)  But then, I was allowed to begin.

We were in a smaller auditorium, with a good-sized stage, and I relocated both myself and the students I was to teach there.  There was another group of students in attendance, presumably to watch, but when I arranged all of us, including me, into the familiar circle, and they were excluded by our backs, they soon enough disappeared.

The first part of the session was very familiar, even from the past few weeks – a loosening-up, playing zip, zap, boing (which they enjoyed, obviously) but more importantly introducing myself as a good-natured clown who knew stuff.  There was a good deal of laughter, which reassured me that we were going to get along just fine.

The next few hours were less immediately familiar – and I rather regretted leaving my scrawled notes in my jacket – my memory is not what it was.  But the material, and the approach were familiar enough from my days teaching this sort of stuff, and these sort of students, to A level groups.  A general introduction to Berkoff (I had chosen him as his work was both fun – students generally love Berkoff – and familiar to them (and to Rohit, who was also there watching.)

All familiar activities from then on – extreme characterisation, mime, stylised violence… before Rohit reminded me to take, and give them, a short break.  And then the concept of people being things… only things with consciousness, and attitude.  A door was the introduction to this, and these, performed in pairs, were all superb – so refreshing when you realise you are not having to drag half the class with you – with the final group in particular (through arithmetical necessity a group of three) remarkably sophisticated and clever.

The group challenge we moved onto was entirely new territory for me as well as them, when I asked them to recreate the chaos of an Indian road, with all that is on it.  It was, of course, utterly mad and chaotic, as it would have to be, and then we ran it again, with slightly more structure, in that it was shaped more towards an audience.

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The final exercise of the day was a Berkoff “machine” – a repeated sequence of moves and spoken lines, based in this case on a domestic breakfast scene in a working-class household.  My expectations were immediately upset by the fact that two groups did not use chairs (thus revealing the depth of my lack of cultural awareness).  We were doing this in an almighty rush, so it did take some time to put the concept across – this would normally, even with committed and talented students such as these, take at the very least a couple of hours to put across.  As a result, there was some confusion as to what was required, and I was a little disappointed as to the result; I was keen not to end today\’s session on a down beat note.  But we ran it again, overlapping the four groups and building to a crescendo, which made for a more satisfactory conclusion.

They were using, by the way, in place of Berkoff’s cockney delivery of his early work, the local equivalent – a street language (it has a name, but I’ve forgotten it) which is a mixture of Hindi, Urdu, English words, and slang).  They all understand English well, but performing in it would be a different matter.

Rohit told me we could have an extra hour tomorrow – there was already one pencilled in as “rehearsal”, and everyone could come an hour earlier – which gave a bit more chance to produce the promised “performance”.  (Why I tied myself into such a straitjacket I have no idea.)  We had all, I think, enjoyed it immensely, but tomorrow would be the pressure day.  Pressure for all of us to produce a performance; and more for me, as I was required to deliver a speech on the place of Drama in education.  Exhalation of breath.