Written by Isha G. Vashista and Ankita Ganguly
Edited by Vyakhya Vashishth
Illustration by Ananya Prabhakar
On the 7th of May 2022, the second batch of BA Liberal Arts produced their first ever production – NAVARASA in the main auditorium of the Bannerghatta Road campus. This is how we, the students, went about this production, and created a beautiful box of memories along the way.
This production allowed the Liberal Arts team to display their creative side to a live audience for the first time. The Liberal Arts course contains a subject called Performative Arts which allows the student to choose between three art forms – music, dance and theatre. We were initially exposed to all the three artforms before allowing us to pick one based on our interests to continue in the second semester which we would work on for the production at the end of the year. Since the production involved the portrayal of the Navarasa through various art forms, each wing was given three Rasas to work on and perfect as their masterpiece. Throughout the second half of the first year, we assembled and conducted meetings to ideate for the production which included promotion ideas as well as the plot of the production as well. Since tickets were in the form of donor passes all profits from the ticket sales as well as the bake sales were given to the Child Sponsorship Programme, a committee that comes under the Centre for Social Action that helps provide a means of education for underprivileged children. The three wings had separate meetings as well to discuss how to go about their rasas.
We came up with the idea to conduct bake sales during certain hours of the day simultaneously with the ticket stalls as a means to attract people into purchasing a ticket.
We toiled for a month to bring this production to life, all while attending classes during the day while squeezing in practice sessions during the free hours or the hours allotted for the Performative Arts classes. As the day of the production drew near, the practice sessions grew even more rigorous with us showing up early in the morning for practice before attending our classes at 8:30 am and then continuing practice till late in the evening. Not even the public holidays were spared.
All in all, this production was an experience unlike any other experience and even though it was quite hectic for us and was met with critical responses from the audience, be it a parent or a faculty member. The success of the production was celebrated backstage with teary eyes and roaring laughter reminiscing the hard work that was put into making the first ever Liberal Arts production a massive success.
Then came 1st May, 2022. With the production 6 days away, promotions had to start. Our audience being there depended on it. Planning had been done. You could have seen a group of 51 students staying on campus and coming up with a game plan on 28th April, talking, arguing and trying to figure out the best way to market our creation. Creativity really came through that evening. A bake sale, a quadrangle event, posters, class-to-class promotions, every way that we could promote, was thought and implemented. The bake sale especially came through, selling almost 80-100 tickets with brownies, cupcakes and baked goodies. The Quadrangle event was something new, which encompassed all art forms with the theme and portrayed the essence of Navarasa.
All of us told anyone and everyone we knew and sold as many tickets as we could. Safe to say, we left no stone unturned to make known that we were making something and that it was our own creation. The proudest moment? The day before the production. When everything that could have been done, was done and we went to sleep knowing we put our all in. From ideation, to practicing, to creating art, to marketing our production, from the start to the finish, it was us who made it happen.
7th May. The D-Day. A final run-through started our day, where the lights and sounds that would make or break our performance were decided and set for the performance that would come in a few hours. And then started the whole production. The hustle and bustle of the green room was unmatched as makeup brushes, eyeshadows, clothes flew everywhere and passed every other hand that was there. Makeup was our own piece of art that day as we had decided to save up the money we had raised to give to the Child Sponsorship Programme, the CSA-affiliated programme. Dressed ready for the stage, it was our programme coordinator’s pep talk that kicked us off. The show began. Music started off Shringara, followed by the creations of the theatre company. Each emotion was portrayed by the art forms and took to the stage with thunder.
The audience felt the emotions as each performance on stage. And the sigh of relief that escaped all of us at the end is unmet by any other. The happiness of actually seeing this through and giving our best can only be equaled by the love we felt for each other and our experience of having done this. The pride on our professors' faces, on our families’ faces and on our faces could be heard with the cheers that echoed throughout the auditorium, in the speeches given by our professors and the applause of the audience. The experience was one that only a few get once in their lifetime and we were lucky enough to have been a part of it. What emerged was not only our creativity but also a family within our class and bond that couldn’t easily be broken.
Comments