I am... me?

8th September, 2015.

What happens when you go to a random stranger and say hello to them? You give them your hand and they shake it if your greeting is welcome. What happens next? You give them your business card perhaps? Or you make small talk. If this goes well then what happens?

Nothing much except, you have extended your hand in friendship (or perhaps a purely professional relationship) with a random stranger. You have made someone happy so, you have done a good deed because you have for that moment made the world a better place. What happens if the act of giving the business card or making small talk is not welcome? What if the person you attempted to greet and shake hands with refuses to acknowledge your efforts? No matter! Keep trying because that is what life in general and theater endorse. There is no absolute right or wrong, no black or white. There is a relative, a gray area, a liminal space perhaps? Life and theater are dependent on those little decisions one has to take every step of the way. You can have a third, a fourth, a fifth and so on chances to improve upon your performance in theater as every wrong decision and every failure in life is a new chance.

This is a major part of what ethnotheater is.

Similarly, Dr. Hughes basically tested the class by making us take a similar test where you greet someone you (preferably) do not know, give them your business card or shake their hand and so on. If one option doesn’t work you can try another so long as you keep striving. So long as you keep attempting to grow like theater preaches. This simple exercise is an answer to the oft asked question of theaters’ role in one’s daily life. These simple acts are what connect human beings as one web. In theater the act of forming a circle, of putting on a new character everyday – and doing that character justice, is the act of performing under the umbrella term of ethnotheater. Where you constantly have room to grow and be more natural in your efforts with every laboring attempt.

Basically then, the branch of experimental theater is a part of ethnotheater. For instance, the videos shown to the class (by the ASU Team) of the 100% Melbourne or Calcutta in a Box, are examples where real people (common people) get to share their stories in a theater space, and take on the role of a performer. This act of making the ordinary or simple a form of art is fundamentally, what ethnotheater is all about.  

This is where the ‘I am’ and ‘I want’ play a new role. Since the Professors had shared the above mentioned videos with us, they now made us take two papers each (one of I am and the other of I want) so, we could perform with the papers serving the purpose of our primary script. The idea being that you take on a character that may be entirely different from the person you are and despite your hesitations you do it justice. It was to teach the class that the characters you choose take on become a part of your being and you connect to them in a way that only you can understand because you have been through the ordeal of putting yourself in their shoes, as the age old saying goes, ‘you can’t truly know a person till you out yourself in their shoes’.