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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Be comfortable in your skin
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Be comfortable in your skin

A cache of workshops at the fifth NCPA Summer Fiesta are geared for teenagers

Saple at a workshopPremium
Saple at a workshop

Marking Mumbai on a physical map of India may be a no-brainer for a lot of city children; it’s something they’ve likely done in geography class already. Now a summer workshop at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai will try to inverse how children look at cartography, by shifting the focus to mapping the city through the prism of personal experience and memory.

Trainer Sananda Mukhopadhyaya says, “You see maps everywhere, especially with Google Maps being so accessible." The point of this workshop, explains Mukhopadhyaya, “is to layer the cartology workshop—where 20-25 participants aged 13-16 will learn skills relating to actually making maps. It will be a collusion of exploring identity and how we are made as well as how spaces are mapped."

The fifth edition of the NCPA Summer Fiesta 2014 as a whole includes 33 workshops designed variously for the 4-18 age group and covers fields like dance and theatre. A cache of these workshops is geared towards helping adolescents and teenagers negotiate difficult subjects like understanding themselves and their surroundings, and expressing themselves.

Mukhopadhyaya, who is also offering the “Flock Together" ensemble workshop at the NCPA for 12- to 14-year-olds, says this is an “interesting age" to work with. It’s a time when most children are struggling to articulate their choices, when they’re just starting to become conscious about their bodies. “Tell a group of five-year-olds to form a wave and they have no problem working together. Try and get 13-year-olds to show you how they would depict a traffic scene and the response will be nowhere near as agile," she says. The underlying idea of her five-day workshop is to train participants in this negotiation of the self within a group.

Actor Sujay Saple, who is offering the “Magic of Movement" class at the NCPA Summer Fiesta, is also focusing on this age group. In his interactions with the participants, he won’t be giving instructions as much as helping children aged 10-16 to “open up some things within" by practising games and theatre exercises with them. One of the games he’ll play with the 20-25 participants, for example, is a word-association game, where one player gives a word and another says the first thing that comes to her mind. The one strict rule of the game is that players can’t take time to think before answering—it has to be spontaneous, instantaneous. Saple will introduce just one twist in the game—participants will be asked to enact with their bodies the thing or feeling they associate with the words. “It will give them a better understanding of themselves, the ability to express not just their thoughts but also their innermost feelings," says Saple.

Some of the workshops, like the “SPIT Theory" classes offered by theatre company Silly Point Production, will also culminate in stage performances by the children. Actor Meherzad Patel, who will conduct the SPIT classes, explains that the idea of the workshop, which is designed for 13- to 18-year-olds, is to get everyone up on stage, no matter how big or small their roles. “We will teach the participants how to enunciate, how to stand on stage", and will cover “script to stage production" aspects of theatre, bringing in theatre practitioners and technicians to talk to the participants. The idea is not just to get the children interested in theatre but to make them “career-ready", says Patel.

The NCPA Summer Fiesta will be held from 2 May-1 June at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, NCPA Marg, Nariman Point, Mumbai. Timings and dates for individual workshops vary. Fees start at 1,000. For the detailed schedule, visit www.ncpamumbai.com

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Published: 24 Apr 2014, 08:36 PM IST
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