On 25th July, Grade 11 students performed the play “Lights, Camera, Eloquence” for the whole of Sahyadri School and the visiting parents. The play was an hour and a half long. It was the culmination of a month-long effort, dozens of run-throughs and hours of collecting props and costumes. The process took unimaginable amounts of hard work. Many people spend their entire day working on the play. We assembled for play practice during our unstructured time, games time and sometimes class time as well.
Aamna akka facilitated the production of the play. On June 24th, she assigned 11 students as script-writers. We went through a lot of brainstorming sessions, sometimes gathering at night in akka’s place to try out different possibilities of dialogues and scenes. When we actually put a pen to the paper we decided that this play will be about the Elocution Competition. Akka started the auditions, and selected our 6 main characters. Their speeches were also finalized.
We finally finished the script on 9th July after multiple extensions. We were happy with our work. Meanwhile, akka assigned workgroups - Lights, Sound, Costumes, Props, Set etc.
As we started practicing the script, we kept adapting the script to adjust and enhance the flow of the play. We would edit the script almost daily, looking at the requirements of the characters.
We kept practicing till we got flawless movements, confident dialogue deliveries and seamless transitions from one scene to the other. We dealt with a lot of challenges such as technical glitches, lights going out, speakers draining batteries to name a few. Some we overcame and some we just solved with Indian Jugaad.
The final coming together of the play was amazing! There were few minor slip-ups but it was unnoticeable.
When the play was over, we were filled with a sense of achievement, relief and a bit of sadness. No matter how tiring at times it was, it was a source of enthusiasm for us as we were the creators.
Along with the entire experience of being in play, what will stay with us is the memories we created with our batch.