Storytelling is an art that is quickly going out of fashion but catching Women's Christian College's play this weekend might just bring the whole romance of storytelling back to our lives.
The city always looks forward to WCC's annual plays but this time everyone is in for a special surprise - for the first time ever, WCC will be performing an original script conceived and brought to life by the students. The team say that the play is highly experimental and based on their improvisations.
The play is loosely based on and inspired by the Grimm's fairytale 'Town Musicians of Bremin' and is also similarly titled as 'The Musicians of Bremin' but the students have taken the characters from the story and entirely made it their own.
The Grimm's fairtytale tells the story of four animals - a dog, a cat, a rooster and a donkey that are past their prime years and are becoming a burden on their owners. The animals then make their way to the town of Bremin where they help the villagers regain the property they lost to a gang of robbers who had been plundering the town.
The WCC theatre team has taken these four characters, made them human - a drummer, a poet, an actress and a singer and tell their stories in the play. The characters were developed over a series of improvisations workshops that the team attended over the course of a month.
In their version of the story, the four characters are shown as being ambitious in their lives but the people who surround them neither recognize nor encourage the talent they showcase. Distraught over the hostility of their families and employers, they set off to the land of Bremin where the four-run into each other and then set out to pursue their dreams. Similar to the story, the four then save the town from robbers and return the stolen goods to the villagers.
Hans Kaushik, the director the play said that besides the Grimm's fairytale, the other story that influenced the play was Italio Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies, where a group of characters lose their voice while travelling through a forest and tell their individual stories through tarot cards.
Kaushik says that the play in its own way of storytelling brings together all the characters and paints their individual stories and interlinks these stories with others. "You need a bunch of voices to come together to tell a story and all stories impact each other in some way or the other, they are all connected. That is what we've tried to show through this play," Kaushik explained.
What is most surprising about the whole performance is that fact that the team had no written script, "The whole play is based on improvisations so the characters' dialogues were also something the students came up with," Kaushik explained. The fact that there is no script is completely unpredictable because there wasn't a single instance in the play where any of the characters seemed to say anything that hadn't already been written down for them.
The performances of the entire crew was on the money and a few of the characters totally lived their characters. It makes it easier to believe that they truly were living their roles because there was no other way for them to perform their roles to perfections since they had no script or character description to rely on.
What is particularly outstanding about the play is the costumes. Since the play is a series of stories, one performer plays more than one character but there is no elaborate costume changing process. The actors are all dressed uniformly and slip in and out of character by just wearing a certain type of coat, the coats are colourful and don't really given the audience an insight into the time period of the play which makes it all the more interesting.
Towards, the end of the play, the host or the narrator of the play talks about how all our stories are intertwined just like the characters on stage and they would come a day when our stories would get told as well. Well, the audience members would definitely trust WCC with their stories at the end of the performance, that is for sure.
The play will be performed for three days starting Thursday at the WCC auditorium at 6.30 pm. Please watch.
