Laugh your way through
INTERACTIVE THEATRE
Two plays performed, in the City, recently had the audience in splits
There are two forms of theatre — one where you go watch a play and forget all about it and another where you actually watch it, talk about it and discuss it at length. Theatre lovers, in the City, were treated to both these forms recently.
One where the play is discussed is called playback theatre.
Conceived in 1975 in New York, it is a unique collaboration between performers and audience where the audience share a feel, moment or an incident from their life, and they are enacted by the actors on stage.
The impromptu story performed comes to life with artistic shape and nuances. The recreation of the story is often non-naturalalistic where actors use metaphors, symbols and songs.
Yours Truly is a theatre group that specialises in this format of interactive theatre. They recently held a theatre show where they invited the audience to get involved with them and had them in splits because the theme was Don’t make me laugh. It was conducted in three phases.
The first round was called Fluid where a phrase was given by the audience and it is enacted by the group.
The idea was When do you laugh? The audience responded with situations like when one’s boss cracks a PJ, how is one forced to laugh, laughing while mimicking stars, laughing out loud when someone is seriously doing yoga.
Once these situations were discussed, the actors enacted them and it looked like the actors were there when these incidents took place.
Round two saw audience recalling humourous incidents in their life. Two situations were chosen and were discussed in detail and then acted out.
One of them was about how four teachers who bunked their classes to watch a movie.
They bumped into their students in the theatre. It was an embarrassing situation though. This was enacted.
“The representation of my situation was better than what I went through. The expressions on the faces of the actors was amazing,” said Amit, the lecturer who was caught in one such situation.
The final round called Conflict portrayed conflicting situations that people face in their lives, instances such as to marry or not, whether to quit a job or not. These were also enacted using metaphors.
