Crafting Stories - Fellows in Action!

Hello everyone, we are so excited to be back with our third blog, keeping up with our cohort of 14 amazing storytellers!

We’re in the final leg of the fellowship, and the energy around us is changing. Ideas are taking shape - moving off the page and into the space, ushering in a new rhythm that is slower, more deliberate, driven by more thoughtful questions and more precise decisions. Before we look ahead at what is to come, here’s a quick update on everything that’s happened since we last checked in.

Diving into Stanislavski, Personal Voices, and the Art of Storytelling

Unit Three brought us to the core of the actor’s craft, this time rooted in Konstantin Stanislavski’s seminal approach to theatre-making, but unmistakably shaped by personal experience. This module, led by our core team and eminent faculty Amba (Head of Performance) and Rudy (Course Director), equipped our cohort with key tools of performance - objective, action, and given circumstances. Students explored how to make clear choices in performance and ask necessary questions for effective storytelling, like, “Why is my character here?”, “What do they want?”, and “What’s in the way?”

We also spent a wonderful 10 days with Professor Anuradha Kapur on focused acting and devising sessions. Here, students were pushed to reflect on their decisions when building scenes, which sparked larger conversations about the nature of realism, and how anything can feel real and visceral on stage if performed with conviction.

Additionally, with this unit the Performance Making Challenges took on a new pace, each prompt stretched across two weeks, allowing fellows to perform their original pieces, and rework them the following week based on feedback from faculty. This process imbued each performance with a new set of stakes, and an exciting new array of challenges and learnings.

This unit, the prompts our fellows were given were :

• Dramatic Arc, Building to an Act of Violence - Set during a tense family dinner, this challenge explored how to build a slow, justified escalation toward an act of violence, focusing on character relationships and tension. 

• What Matters? - Drawing from their own lived realities, students crafted performances rooted in contemporary context, using both words and silence to deliver a powerful message. 

Shows that Made Us Think!

The cohort stepped out of the studio and into the audience again, engaging with powerful performances across the city. They watched Firefly Women by Manjari Kaul and Deepika Chauhan at Lilanoor, and What the Fish is All the Fuss About, performed by our very own Rudy at Oddbird Theatre. Both pieces sparked rich conversations about theatrical form, intention, and the role of performance in reflecting, and reimagining the world we live in.

From Learning to Making - The Final Push

We’ve now stepped into Unit Four: Creation Month, the final phase of this journey - for now. This marks the shift from training to creation. Fellows are now developing their original devised performances, which will be shared with the public soon (stay tuned!). 

To enable this process, we've had a series of classes and workshops : 

• Writing for Theatre with Rajesh Nirmal has helped our cohort to craft compelling narratives and scenes, with actionable advice on scripting action and dialogue.

• Sound & Light Workshops with Samar Grewal and Anuj Chopra pushed students to think about how sound and light can elevate a performance, and equipped them with a more practical understanding of technical tools. 

• Furthering their work on scenography, students experimented with materials and space during the Design For Theatre sessions with Oroon Das.

As the countdown to final performances begins, the space is buzzing with energy. Scripts are evolving, rehearsals are intensifying, and every detail is being carefully crafted with the guidance of mentors Dhwani Vij and Savita Rani.

Here’s to the final stretch, and to performances that will embody everything this journey has been about!