Sculpting a Play Sudhanva Deshpande Mala Hashmi as Dadi ( grandmother) It happens inevitably. Whenever I mention that a play has been improvised, people tend to imagine that it is improvised in performance and they cannot believe that, because what they have seen seems like the performance of a fully-finished text. Even after I explain that 'improvisation' is only the technique one has used to evolve the play, a feeling of slight disbelief persists. It may have to do with the fact that the word 'improvisation', along with its near cousin `impromptu', carries connotations of something unplanned, unstructured, unorganized. Improvisations are, of course, all that, also pretty often chaotic, but it is possible to use this chaos to evolve texts. Through the maze of confusion, through the pulls and pressures every actor and director exerts on nebulous, barely-visible ideas, through false starts, speed-breakers, and dead 1 ends, through all this it is yet possible to create texts that are complex, multi-layered, sophisticated, and dramatic. I say this on the evidence of two plays that Jana Natya Manch (Janam) evolved in 1995, Artanaad ('A Cry of Anguish', a play on child sexual abuse) and Andhera Aftaab Mangega ('Darkness Will Beget the Dawn', in rough translation; a play on the lives of the working class in Delhi). I describe below the process we used to evolve Andhera. (I do realize, of course, that 'improvisation' has become something of a catchword in theatre, nearly a fashion, especially since the 1960s: everybody seems to be improvising. But that doesn't mean that the technique has lost all relevance, and in any case the uniqueness of an experience is not the only I lit, 'new' worker Shakeel as Badal becomes a 'soft' one when dealing with capital and a 'hard' one when dealing with labour. In more human terms, this means that more and more modernization in the lives of the top ten per cent has an underside, more and more primitive methods of exploitation of the remaining ninety per cent. This was the reality we were to somehow capture in a 30-40 minute street play which, incidentally, I was to direct. Our Balwant improvisations had not yielded a play, but when, in the summer of 95, we decided to do a play on child sexual abuse, improvisations had produced a play. Actually, Artannad was not entirely evolved from improvisations. We had started out with two scripts 2 which were really first drafts, sort of proto-scripts, both very different in form and content. We then started improvising using one of those scripts as a take-off point to build scenes, so that the play, in the end, was very different from the original proto-scripts. Even so, in the beginning we did have a take-off point and that was important, because the actors could see the potential points of interest as well as the problem areas to be avoided or overcome. Also, working with a text meant that no matter how much you changed it during improvisations, what tended to emerge in the end, with directorial polish, also assumed the form of a finished text; only, the text existed in actor's memories rather than on paper. Actors adhere to this text and the only improvisations that occur are the kinds that accompany the repeated performance of any dramatic text. The Artanaad experience had been pretty rich and the play has done very well (for its richness of characterizations and the complexity of its arguments, it remains a personal favourite for me), so it was natural that we decided to try similar methods for Andhera. Before actual rehearsals began, we invited two of our trade union comrades (from CITU), both of whom have risen from the ranks of workers to positions of leadership, to talk to us about their personal experiences. Andhera, we had decided, would chronicle the beginning and birth of struggle, rather than its development and culmination. This was I think a logical focus to choose after what we had seen in the zone and elsewhere that in the political, economic, and ideological realities of liberalization, it is becoming increasingly difficult to simply organize labourers in unions. There exist several constraints to the growth of a radical working-class movement, and these constraints are built into the structure of things in the zone-the business of identity cards, and so on. But what you see in the zone is only the starkest form of a much wider process in operation 3 The workers decide to Make a window all over India. Take, for instance, the contract labour system which is widely in use in Delhi. Legally an enterprise cannot be called a factory unless it employs a certain minimum number of workers. Now, unless an enterprise is legally a 'factory', how do you agitate for the implementation of the Factory Act and labour laws? Factory owners forever want to bypass these laws, and they do this by showing less than the requisite number of workers on their rolls and employ the rest on contract. Thus, they pay much less wage to one section of the workers, those on contract, and create an artificial divide between workers, making their unionization more difficult. Many more such examples can be cited. Our questions to our comrades fell into two broad categories. One, there were questions regarding the experience of being a worker-what it means to actually work inside a factory, how employers and supervisors behave with workers, how workers unwind after work, and so on. Two, there were questions about actual instances of struggle-how struggles begin, how unions are actually formed, the kind of role various unions play, what employers do when faced with struggle, and so on. Without these two sessions with our comrades, I can safely say, Andhera would not have happened. All the raw material for the play originally came from here. 4 Listening to anecdotes, however, is simply done; making a play, as any theatre person will vouch, is not. First day of rehearsal: I reached rehearsal with a blank mind. I had no notion of what to do. After a short routine of warming up exercises, I gave the actors a short, quiet speech, the sum of which was: All right guys, we can do it. I don't know if they believed me, but I didn't. I was nervous, scared. The script is such a wonderful thing-it gives you something to do on the first day; if you can't think of anything else, at least you can get actors to just read it. Without it, what do you do? As I ended my speech, there appeared, suddenly, the glimmer of first ideas. A worker had died in an accident at work. What happens in the factory? What happens in the basti? A young worker proposes to his sweetheart. Two workers, friends, in love with the same girl. A worker has been bashed up by the supervisor and guards. What do other workers do? The corpse of the worker who has died in an accident at work is lying on the arthi, about to be taken for cremation. Suddenly, someone says: Arthi nahin uthegi ('The corpse will not be taken away'). The improvisations at this stage were completely free, with no directorial guidance. Except that each improvisation was a short one- 5 The morkers sec a fellow-worker bring beaten up the moment the first mistake was made (like an actor going out of character), or the improvisation became repetitive (the same thing being said or done again and again), I would stop the improvisation, and give the actors another idea to work on. After every 4 or 5 such improvisations, each lasting 2-5 minutes, we would analyse them, very briefly. This kind of work went on for 3-4 days. It had been different during Artanaad. Then, there was no fixed deadline for the play, and we would improvise for as long as 40 minutes at a stretch, ignoring a lot of mistakes that are an inevitable part of improvisations. Here, there was no such luxury. I had given myself six days to have at least one, preferably the first, scene ready. The actors had to be on battle alert all the time. Within the first couple of days or so, a number of things were becoming clear, though at that stage I probably could not have articulated them very coherently. One, the play could not be located in the zone-a tiny percentage of Delhi workers even know about the zone. Too much time would be wasted just introducing the concept. Two, the protagonists of the play would be 6 essentially young workers. Three, taking off from there, the play had to be a love story. (Traditionally, most street plays haven't been based on 'plots'; most often, they are a collage of scenes. Even when there are plots, they are taken forward by a sutradhar-like figure or figures. An entirely 'realistic' story, realistically told, is rare.) The love story would also be a private, if somewhat oblique, tribute to Safdar, who began Halla Bol with a love story. Four, a death had to be a central happening in the play. 1'm not sure why this was so. Probably because most of the deathrelated improvisations had worked. Also becausc death can be the most extreme form of exploitation. And last, each scene had to be a short one. That's the only way you can tell any kind of story in 35 minutes. More ideas.