[लंडन ब्रीजवरून # 2] - A Midsummer Day's Dream - Acting at London's Drama Workshop!

It is quarter past six - a mid week summer evening in June. I go underground at London Bridge tube station to emerge ten minutes later from Jubilee line at Waterloo which is just two stations away. At the Waterloo terminus I come across many people returning from Ascot in their aristocratic quintessentially British style attire on Platform 18. It must have been a long day of horse racing at the Royal Ascot annual event. Most sacrosanct racing event for the Queen to attend with her own fleet of horses! I wait for all of these VIPs to get down and then embark on the 6.35 pm train going back to Reading from Waterloo. It is a dullish routine now - for the next 60 minutes I shall be on this train alighting at Egham station, followed by a long 30 minutes walk to my new home. It will be very late by the local standards and I have to be at the mercy of my new Desi house-mates to have some food for dinner! With no energy left for cooking I figure out a worst case Khichdi plan if they are not around! With that thought, I start gazing at the silhouette of the passing Victorian structures.  By the time train reaches Richmond station, London's skyline disappears before my eyes. I look inward and start musing. I only had a handful days left before saying final goodbye to this grand old city. I quipped to myself - "Oh my goodness! there is so much still left to be ticked off my wish list!" - It's that moment when you want to do something desperately about it. Also it will be easier now when you are alone, a free bird! If the family is not around - one can make quick plans and execute them with rigor!

One of the most important things still left open on my bucket list was attending at least one Acting Workshop in the UK! Many other items I had ticked off included visiting Scotland and Wales countryside, visiting Shakespeare's birthplace (Stratford-upon-Avon) & Globe theater, watching Wimbledon tennis (on Center Court!), Cricket on Lords and a few more. I always choose to leave some things untouched on the wish list for the next visit! It gives you hope and pacification that you would come back again to fulfill those and not say forever-goodbye to this place. Sure enough, I did not want my dramatic cravings unattended in this one though - rightly so because I follow so much of a local theater back home. Not for the love of acting at all, but the whole process of bringing a play alive with all aspects of it including backstage activities! Secondly, that is a great platform to get rid of your inhibitions - temporarily at least if you can not do otherwise in real life. Thirdly, it is a powerful medium to get across critical and novel thoughts and not just an entertainment. So, I firmly decide to attend one there. As I reach home and finish my dinner with a few leftovers (courtesy house-mates!), I immediately open my laptop and find a place online having convincing ratings called the "City Academy" and enroll myself there for a Beginner's one day course in acting by Emily May Smith, a renowned actress herself in plays and sitcoms.

...It was a bright sunny Sunday of England's summer - 9th July to be precise. On the previous day - I was privileged to be at THE Wimbledon's center court and watch THE Roger Federer playing in the 4th round tennis match and ultimately winning it!  It was like a dream weekend, nothing can get better than this! Wimbledon visit is a long story to be narrated at some other leisure time. The point is - I was so tired after spending almost 16 hours at Wimbledon reaching home late on Saturday night and being fully sleep deprived. For people who commute to London on weekdays in crammed trains and tubes it is disgusting to travel back on a weekend again even though trains are empty! I had to do it this one last time!! No excuses...I woke up early and got myself ready. To cut it short - I reached the City Academy, Rosebery Avenue, Farringdon, North London at 9:30 am - an hour early in all the excitement for a 10:30 am start!!

There used to be two main schools of thoughts in the drama circles of Mumbai and Maharashtra - one that of Mrs. Vijaya Mehta and the other belonged to Pundit Satyadev Dubey. These two stalwarts were institutions in themselves. All the workshops that happen in the state would follow majority of their methods or are conducted by their direct disciples. I attended a few such workshops back home. However, this one would certainly give me a different perspective and experience. After-all it was happening on Shakespeare's own land in Queen's English! 

I was soon joined by a very shy, feeble tongued white British man who was there perhaps to boost his confidence! This was a rare breed in UK and if not him, watching him helped boost my confidence at least (😎😎!). Then another lady joined who was similar in nature, perhaps more challenged to open up conversations with others (another rare breed indeed - a shy English lady!). Participants kept joining us gradually - an English literature professor of Mediterranean origins who wanted to read Shakepeare's passages in dramatic fashion to his college students, a New Zealand-er young lady doing part time nanny work after college and pursuing drama as a hobby, a Srilankan-British guy who was helping his brother create short films and also act in it, a Welsh man in his fifties who wanted to follow his passion late in life, a very young French beauty (in early 20s) who worked as an animator for BBC's kids channel Cbeebies and wanted to get this new exposure. There were few others who happened to have nothing to do on a Sunday morning and just barged in with friends who had something of avid interest to do!  A very diverse crowd indeed, however mostly native, naturalized English speakers except me and the French young woman (For our state of English! - at least her English could have been "overlooked" for her innocent looks or French background, but for me nothing was going to help either in the grueling day ahead!).

Finally as we waited in that "art studio like" underground place, our coach Emily arrived on a bicycle. A short white smart funky lady. She parked her bike inside the studio room. One could easily make out she's an artist from her appearance and style!! She greeted all of us and took us further down in a lower basement hall! It was a bigger hall accommodating about 20 odd people (if I remember correctly there were 12 of us participating) . This was a basic acting workshop - Emily described the 5 different acting stages in which it would be conducted - namely 1) Saying Yes, 2) Accepting and Building, 3) Spontaneity, 4) Status, and 5) Intention. To summarize - it would start with a positive entry for the character on stage, accept the situation which is brewing up in-front of you before your stage entry, acknowledge it and start conversation, building spontaneity in reactions based on opposite actions and then finally establishing status of your character on stage along with its (real) intentions in the play to the audience. Well, one thing I liked about this was there was no mention of a typical protagonist / antagonist characters in the plots! The shades of all characters we played were always grey! 12 shades of grey for 12 participants.
The workshop started with a space walk - to cover the space as much as we can and gauge the stage! It was followed by typical warm-up instructions like Jump/Clap/Up/Down etc and then reversal of those instructions for alertness. This session included mostly corporate team building like games (In one of the games of - instructions and elimination rounds I came only second to the Welsh man!). It got truly kicked off when we had voice modulation exercises that too starting with an Om (ॐ)! Something to be proud of for us Indians 😊 We had to speak and scream in various strange voices from the bottom of our bellies or "diaphragms" to use the right technical term.

The next key activity was "Leader Identification". One person has to lead and perform various bodily movements first and then there will be no leader at all after a while. The team however observes and starts imitating someone making him/her a random leader. This leader changes automatically again as time passes, but no one would choose or explicitly indicate the leader. These were subtle exercises aimed at improving one's observation skills.

Many of the activities were conducted in pairs. The first one was interesting and I was lucky(!) to be paired with the French beauty on this one. The exercise was to act like mirrors for each other. You have to look into the other's eyes and start with some hand movements - imitate the other person as if you are the mirror of him/her. In this too no one was lead, but one of us would start with random actions and the other person will follow. I looked into her eyes and she too followed. Very innocent, beautiful, simple but gorgeous French beauty! This was perhaps the longest duration recorded in my life-time that went "without winking"! 😍(I overheard someone saying and winking - mine was the most natural acting amongst all pairs! The mirror crashed 😉).

This was followed by a gifting exercise. We have to surprise our partner with a gift they could not imagine and observe their reactions. I was with the Srilankan Brit man in this one and I surprised him gifting a big Srilankan elephant too!! The next one seemed to be a very British exercise. These English blokes are notorious for their stiff upper lip! The exercise was about the neck not the lip though - yes, you have to keep your neck straight and stiff. Without moving it at all one has to speak to the other person. In addition we were asked to do some hand movements and start with a fumbling sound like "aa...aaa...aaaa" before saying a sentence. I was like - we Indians are expert in this one, should be a peace of cake!😅 Mumbling without proper words pronounced. But alas! Acting it is a completely different ballgame. My opponent - The New Zealander nanny had more finesse in fumbling and she outsmarted me!! I even told Emily after this exercise that I should have done this better naturally!

After this we started with Obstruction and Welcome exercise. In this a person would walk from one corner of the room to another diagonally. All other people would stand in the middle and obstruct his/her way deliberately with force so much so that the person should not be able to pass easily. He/she has to overcome this obstruction and reach the other end. The second part of this activity was exactly opposite. When you are walking diagonally and people are standing in between talking to each other they would give you a way - rather in a welcoming style.

The next important activity we performed was in the whole group. It was very interesting one. We had to speak in numbers with each other not using any dialogues at all. All the emotions have to be pronounced with the numbers. A situation will be given to you. You have to understand the numbers of other person - I mean emotions and what they are trying to say.  After practicing this in smaller groups we were given a big exercise. A scene of a party would be enacted. I was elected "the host" of this party. All other participants would walk into my house one by one, I must greet them in numbers and give a hug, get them seated. We will start with a 1, then a 2, followed by 3-4 together depending upon the length of emotions and message! As we cross number 20, another person would enter the scene. This new actor would come with different feelings and may use different tones of voice for numbers based on sadness, happiness, anger, anxiety, surprise etc. As a host my task was tougher to react in numbers matching those gestures. It was truly a party of diverse emotions and for me difficult to handle so many personalities in numbers alone! I thoroughly enjoyed this one though. Despite there being all numbers everywhere we had literally created a scene in which everyone seemed to understand what's happening in the party including our coach with so much spontaneity in it. After all the people arrived, we also had group conversation in numbers which was fantastic. We even offered food and drink in numbers. Finally a drunk lady who seemed to have big upsets with husband fell in my arms crying in numbers and we shut the skit. I have now learnt to understand matter with mere numbers and emotive pitches!

Until this point Emily had covered stages 1 to 3 above. The remaining ones were Status and Intention. Starting with the "status" now - the character or role will have a defined status in the scene of a play. The scale of this status may vary from 1 to 10 - meaning 1 as lowest and 10 as highest status. This status is independent of a person's position, profession, gender, wealth etc. For example - a CEO of a company at home talking to his maid may look reduced to a very low profile worker and his maid with her high pitch and tone may command the conversations with her own demands and rules. This would make the CEO's status lower (1-3) and maid's status higher (7-9) for the play. In this exercise we were given each a character and a status. We have to come forward and introduce ourselves and the audience has to guess the status of this character on a scale of 1 to 10. Sometimes you also have to demonstrate different statuses for the same role. This also helps in defining your bearing for the character which we often find hard to hold for long time. With such fine calibration of scale, it would be easier to remember and adhere to it.
The last stage was about Intentions of the character in the act. Now that we have established the character's identity and status - it's imperative to allude to the character's real intentions in the play. We worked in pairs again. Each pair was given a sentence to kick-start which went something like this - "You are late! I am sorry, but you are here... Yes, I am!". We had to build a whole scene based on this. I had that shy Brit lady as my partner in this. I had done this in my childhood drama workshops too. We started with a typical scene of a drunk husband coming back home late and his wife confronting him. The lady and I managed this well and also improvised. Then we had reversal of intentions and positions too. I became the henpecked victimized husband and she would come home late. This exercise demanded all previous learnings especially establishing your status and maintaining it throughout, which was a big challenge. It proved tougher for me than the lady. We realised that intentions need to be practiced more and more as that was the crucial part of any play and often difficult to express.
Finally before the closure we had feedback discussion with Emily. She spoke about all the acts and what improvisations were possible. I told her that with my Indian experience it's often difficult to keep attention to hand movements while acting. I felt this might be easier for an Englishman as they are used to this. A few takeaways for me apart from the disciplined sessions were - we actually knew what we are going to achieve and also how the different exercises and activities put us on track for those in order. Language was not so much important as I thought it would be - barring a few skits. We could be quirky and imaginative in our acts and had the freedom within the confines of the rules of the act. There were many similarities of course in the way workshops are conducted back home too. At the end of the day it was about your learnings. There was no good/bad or comparisons with anyone but self! You have the feedback and improvement areas.
We thanked Emily for her simple and effective ways of coaching. The English professor wanted to read out Shakespearean passages to her later. I bid goodbye to other workshop colleagues and started back my journey to Waterloo terminus this time more content though after a dream come true day. It was quarter past six again in Big Ben on a Sunday evening!