Kathakali reflection

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Kathakali is a form of musical theatre with its roots sunk in late 16th century South India. This form of theatre comprises of “actors who use mudras, or hand gestures that convey the dialogue of their individual character, as well as bhava, or using facial expressions to show the internal state of their characters.”

On our first lesson back to theatre, Miss Parr organized a theatre workshop with a Kathakali practitioner who visited us at school. Unlike our previous online workshops, this one was a breath of fresh air amid covid times. 

We began the workshop by learning the basics of the Kathakali theatre style- the ‘Mudras.’ The Mudras are gestures used as a nonverbal method of communicating emotions, expressions, and feelings to the audience.

We learned nine different types of mudras by bending and manipulating our fingers. As a performer, I discovered another medium to express myself without the use of dialogue and how self-expression was possible even by isolating a specific part of our body to the audience.

As the workshop progressed, we combined footwork and eye work simultaneously with hand movement, making the workshop even more challenging and exhausting- in the best way! The strenuous footwork seriously got us holding on to our quad muscles as we maintained squat positions at all times. However, these challenging exercises and footwork taught me a lot about balance and staying in character the whole time.

Belonging to North India myself, I have seen similar theatre in my culture but never so rigorous and expressive! As a performer, I felt proud and surprised to notice this theatre style originating from my country. I hope I can get the opportunity to discover more theatre styles that use different mediums to express emotions!!

KAHAANI- CREATIVITY REFLECTION

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KAHAANI:

–LO1– AWARENESS
Increased awareness of strengths and areas for growth
–LO3-INITIATIVE
Planning & initiating activities
–LO4– COMMITMENT
Showing perseverance, resilience
–LO5– COLLABORATION
Working together to achieve an outcome

Reflection 1-
It’s just the start of the Kahaani (a dance showcase to raise funds and awareness for the organizations supported by Kolkata GC)rehearsal process. I am beyond grateful to be a dance leader. I have been dancing for almost all my life, and Kahaani is an excellent platform for me to express my creativity in dancing and spread awareness on hidden issues of the world. Previously, I was involved in a similar activity like Kahaani, where instead of dancing to raise funds, we raised funds for underprivileged girls’ education via a girls-only basketball league. This year Kahani’s theme runs around shedding light on differently-abled people, and the Bollywood movie we’ve been allotted to highlight is ‘Margarita with a straw.’ The story centers on a girl with cerebral palsy who’s on the road to self-discovery. So the theme we made our dance around was women learning to love themselves, regardless of their “flaws” and reiterating that disability is NOT A FLAW. So our songs flow with women empowerment in mind. We will be starting with a song from Margarita about embracing ourselves, followed by ‘Ek ladki ko Dekha to Aisa Laga’ to celebrate pride and beauty in self-acceptance. Finally, we end with jugni – a song where women break free of everything!
Since I am stuck in New Delhi due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and my co-leader Renee Jaiswal is in Singapore, we are currently devising ways to teach our Kahaani group remotely, Although it seems complicated to manage a group of girls with social distancing and coordinate a google meet call, it is helping me discover newer, and more creative ways to be involved with my team and keep a track on their progress. At the end of the day, I got involved in this activity to spread awareness about disabilities and other issues in our community and embed my firm belief in feminism into the performance. So a minor setback like me not physically being there in Singapore won’t keep me away from my goal.

Reflection 2-
Kahaani rehearsals began last week, and the only thing I can say while sitting 3700 miles away is IT IS HARD, and it is a big challenge at the end of the day. The pandemic has taken a massive toll on the rehearsal process because we can only rehearse on specific days in designated rooms with a cap on how many people can participate. I remember Kahaani as an all-inclusive event allowing as many people from all ethnicities to celebrate my culture- the Indian culture. However, this year due to the new covid restrictions, we are only allowed a maximum of 20 dancers per group, leaving many people wanting to participate behind. Fortunately, until now, we are sailing smoothly with our little group of amazing dancers. Thanks to Renee and I creating our dance routine ahead of time, we can split the girls into different groups and teach them section by section. We were very strategic in our planning to ensure we could sail safely, if not smoothly, even if I’m not in person. I think the girls are showing us fantastic commitment to the activity by advocating for themselves and learning the routine well. Speaking for myself, although I am yet to enter Singapore, I think this is a commitment I have made and will fulfill my duties as a dance leader regardless of the circumstances. Even though I can’t do much sitting from India, I send videos of me doing the steps from time to time on the group chat, and Renee takes me on a google meet during practices. My group then sends recordings of each rehearsal on the chat to give improvement notes to each other. I think the process is going well right now, and hopefully, I can rehearse with them in person soon.

Reflection 3-
I made it into Singapore a few weeks ago, and Kahaani is exactly a month away. We all are very excited about the event, and the dance finally seems to be pulling itself together. As a leader, I am really enjoying this process of collaborating with other group members and taking their input to improvise new steps for our routine. The girls seem to be very flexible with recent changes, so it was easy for us to move formations and revamp our routine since I am here now, and the formations make a lot more sense than they did in the videos. With lost time in the past few months came the responsibility to make up for the practices we lost together. As a team, we decided to spend one to two days a week at school during our winter break and jumped past the challenges of remote learning. Our team as a whole showed great perseverance to improve the dance significantly and collaborate respectfully with each other, even if there were disagreements on certain things. Something that I’ve learned along the rehearsal process is that you can’t achieve perfection overnight. The fact that I wasn’t in Singapore took a massive blow on the team, and we worked together to make up for the time we lost. Even if it took long evenings to figure our routines out, the fact that everyone was willing to put effort into making this the best performance we could, paid off. As a dance leader, I am genuinely amazed at how far we have come, and I can’t wait to have our team perform on the final day!!

Reflection 4-
Kahaani got over last week, and it was one of the most heartbreaking yet beautiful experiences of my life. A few days prior to the show, I got hospitalized due to over-exhaustion, and some illnesses, which caused me to sit out of my own Kahaani dance. It was what I would phrase as the worst day of my life. We were put to the ultimate challenge of restructuring our dance 48 hours before the show if I wouldn’t be able to dance due to weakness. Ultimately, our preparation got executed as I had to take a back seat on the final day. But my journey isn’t all bad necessarily. It took me a week to process what I thought was incredibly unfair towards my team, but I am immensely proud of us. I am very proud of myself for showing determination towards dancing even when I was sick. I danced till I physically fell to the floor, and I prove to myself that I really am passionate about this event and I would never let my team or myself down.
Similarly, my team showed great strength and enthusiasm to learn a new restructured routine to pull the entire dance off without me in it- although they knew I would dance till my last breath and that I was standing in front of their eyes the whole time that they were being recorded on stage. So ultimately, this process has taught me not only what to do when it rains but what to do after the rain. We could have just canceled our dance and cried about it because I was ill. Instead, we accepted that the damage was done, and we decided to move on and overcome this new challenge of producing a restructured dance in under 48 hours. I think patience and resilience were the two most important skills we learned through this process. We stayed together and created a beautiful dance which was the highlight of our process. I have immense respect for all the dancers who participated in this event, especially my team, who learned to collaborate and overcame the hardest of challenges in high-pressure situations.

My learning of sexual abuse

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The me too movement aims to disseminate information about sexual assault and disrupt rape culture. Due to centuries of patriarchy embedded in the society, survivors often get blamed for what was inflicted upon them instead of questioning the perpetrator. I believe this is wrong, and the only way to break the stigma cycle of rape is to empower and educate. One such way to do that is teaching society when they are young about gender roles and healthy personal, sexual boundaries. Rigorous Sexual awareness courses and activities can act as a preventative measure to help shift the next generation’s mindset and slowly balance society. A video I find very useful, which has helped me understand the topic is linked here.

 

My improved exam paper answer

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For the exam I opted to analyse the prose. I realised I was not looking at specific imagery or concepts and was focusing on the passage as a whole instead. Here are few of the corrections I made to my exam paper.

INTRO: In this piece, Maggie O’ Farell is pulsating life through the extract. The environment is reflecting tension- of the land, of the people, and of the surroundings. Nature reflects the mood of the land, how the land has borne a lot in the ancient times, and is still bearing the weight of disputes. This site of dispute is highlighted through the constant use of personification and pathetic fallacy in their extract, where the trees, the bird, and nature create a foreboding atmosphere. The neglect of the baby, and the site of dispute within the house further creates dramatic tension in the passage. This finally leads up to the kinesthetic and auditory imagery amplifying the uncertainty of what happens next.

ONE BODY: O’Farrell employs layers of personification to create tension in the atmosphere of the extract.The trees in the story seem to be “stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves.” The present continuous verbs when put together stir feelings of nervousness, and uncertainty as the verbs are signalling the forthcoming of something. The‘‘restlessness” observed by the trees further forebodes the arrival of the unknown as it describes their “head-tossing” anticipation. Furthermore, the pathetic fallacy helps create an image of anxiousness, and the painful process of waiting. This feeling is strengthened in the third paragraph as the “The garden waits. The trees wait. The seagull, balancing in the sky above the washing, waits.” The tricolon of the personified elements of the environment depict a shift of focus from something macro like the garden to the tree and to something micro like the seagull. There is an observable change in the foreboding tone as well – how the negative mood describing feelings of an incoming storm slowly changes focus to patience and the process of waiting, reiterated by the repetition of the word “wait.” This change can also be shown by the transformation of language from the first to the last sentence. From the hustling trees anxiously awaiting an unknown arrival to a book lying on the ground with its “pages fluttering closed.” It creates a foreboding atmosphere and at the same time gives an insight into the land of disputes, that something was meant to happen over there, there was buildup, ,and now it’s over. It’s just the book lying alone, and waiting for what comes next.

CONCLUSION: O’Farrell has used language as a medium to transfer nervousness into the reader. From the very first imperative simple sentence, “listen,’ which ropes the reader in, to the personification of nature amplifying the foreboding atmosphere, O’Farrell brews anticipation as to what follows next. Throughout the passage she has given this nervousness a pattern, how the focus shifts from macro elements of nature to the incoming of the lady into the garden. Overall the heavy buildup of anxiety by vivid descriptions of restlessness via the environment for the arrival of the lady creates dramatic tension in this passage.

 

Human acts email response

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my email

Miss Werner’s response-

MY MAIN TAKEAWAYS-

  • The novel should be read from the outside, as though I am analysing it and not living in it. I usually tend to get really absorbed in my reading. Therefore, this tip will help me recenter and focus on the concepts, rather than get extremely attached and affected by the writing.
  • The writing style of the novel is very gripping. Although it is very grotesque, there is something oddly encapsulating about it- how it draws you in only to wonder the circumstances of that time.

COVID WISH – POEM

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I made a wish last night,
for this last time, let lovers reunite.
Let souls touch each other as eyes shut dead,
warm bodies gripping hand in hand,
not enough to be said.

Outside in the world, the war must go on.
For out of our indolence, this pandemic may be born.
Hearts wrenching, chanting to faith one last time,
wailing walls holding on to memories,
for when did sanatoria birth into thou holy shrine.

Homely halls still welcome you tonight.
Staying in might spare a life.
Youthful flowers withering in,
no air breathable,
lungs failing thin.

Unbearable pain losing what was thine,
no goodbye,
not this time.
Masked faces, we take on the plight,
for this last time, let lovers reunite.

-VARINI

I wrote this poem as I reflected upon the global pandemic. Our lives have changed immensely over the past year, and this poem is a collection of things I have observed around me. While life in Singapore has slowly started to return to the “new normal,” other places in the world are immensely suffering, including my home country- India. This poem serves as a reminder for me to be grateful and how my words have shaped my understanding of the world.

Different translations of Medea

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To conclude our english unit on Medea by Euripides, we analysed the endings of two different translations of the play – one closer to the original version, and one abridged for the modern audience. Upon reading we discovered the impact of language on the interpretation of the two plays, and how the meanings can vary with language used in the script.

Here is an example of my annotations about the differences in the endings.