Sunday 11 September 2011

SEWA in Lucknow


SEWA, established in 1972, is an organisation of poor, self-employed women workers who earn a living through their own labour or small businesses. SEWA's vision is to to achieve gender equality across India, recognising that economic autonomy is a key step in making Indian women "stronger and more visible". Whilst the SEWA movement is nationwide and has recognised tremendous accolades, the Lucknow branch of the movement has been particularly successful, with its founder, Runa Banerji, being nominated for the Nobel prize in 2006. One of the core projects undertaken by SEWA Lucknow, alongside their large-scale production of beautiful 'Chikan' garments, has been the running of a school since 1982 known as SEWA Samudayik Shiksha Kendra. It was here that Will, Catherine, and I held a series of drama workshops over 2 weeks. 

Compared to Ummeed in Delhi, I found the workshop and rehearsal process at SEWA to be a well oiled machine, complete with illustriously talented kids, a team of attentive and qualified volunteers, and a theatrical culmination of Bollywood proportions (not to mention the 'A team' combination of Will, Catherine, and I). But despite their disciplined attentiveness the kids were far from robotic, and exposed to us flashes of creative brilliance. One young girl composed 2 didactic tales about environmental issues (written in both Hindi and flawless English). It was around one of these stories, ‘The Red Moon’, that we clothed our 20 minute piece of physical theatre.
Catherine doing a mind-blowing turtle 
The whole group making a still image of a marketplace

Whilst the Lucknow projects seemed far more convenient than our Dehli projects, with police driven chauffeurs, devising a decent piece of theatre with 35 energetic young people will never run entirely smoothly, particularly with pressing time constraints. Even so, we devoted the first four workshops to building general drama exercises, including improvising short scenes, using tableaux, introducing music, and a range of ensemble and ‘complicite’ exercises.
Our lovely volunteers surprising Catherine with a birthday party
One issue that became important for us was deciding how far the workshop leaders should enforce their own vision for the final piece. We decided upon a middle way, realising the directorial approach would have the benefit of allowing for some of the less confident and quieter children to be recognized and praised for their involvement, but that the children should also have a chance to take ownership of their work. The evidence of building self confidence as a result of this approach was seen repeatedly throughout the tour, with those who begin as quiet and evasive children becoming more vocal and making bolder moves of self-expression. 

A young student watching the action meekly behind a door. (Photo taken by Mamsi Sekete, tour photographer).
Stylistically, we determined early on that the piece should be focussed upon movement based story-telling rather than dialogue-heavy theatre, not only because our repertoire of exercises had already been directed towards this approach, but also because the project was about undertaking new experiences and word-based theatre is an style to which the kids in Lucknow had previously been exposed. 
As well as the approach we took to construct the piece, there was also the issue of deciding upon a manageable group size. Before arriving at SEWA we had arranged for pupils to self-select for the workshops, which left us with a large group of around 40 (my performing group at the Delhi Umeed home for boys was chiseled down to just 10). Because there was no obvious way to cut down numbers, with auditions being out of the question and totally against the ethos of the project, we decided to split the group in to 3, and devised allocated sections of the story to each mini-group. 
A scene from our final piece - the flower is found a new home on the moon!
A related problem was the practicality of having a large number of local volunteers joining us in the workshops to translate and help to manage the kids. Paradoxically, whilst the act of verbal translation was essential to our project, it could often lead the exercises in unwanted directions as the translators themselves reinterpretted the rules or reason of a game in order to fit with their own thoughts or experience. Volunteers would often over-manage the exercise where it should have been allowed to develop organically, or over-direct the children’s movements which fitted with the teacher-pupil relationship we wanted to move away from. We resolved the issue simply by cutting down the number of volunteers so that only one translator was used for each of the three groups of 10-12 kids, which worked much more smoothly and allowed us to more closely monitor the translation process.
The professional invites for the final event (see the SEWA logo on the bottom left)

I would like to thank the staff and kids of SEWA school, and all our volunteers, for their energy, generosity, time, and general brilliance in helping us with the project. It was a lot of fun, and turned out to be a great success!
More information about SEWA in Lucknow can be found at http://sewalucknow.org/index.html
Theo Boyce

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