Mind Alone is a play that speaks aloud the thoughts inside a child's head as they are trying to make sense of the world. What makes them happy? What makes them sad? What do they feel when they experience something new? Something frightening or challenging? How do they deal with change? What are their thoughts on the world they live in? Their mind is full of emotions and ideas, battling each other. Each section of the play has been created through facilitated sessions and discussions and students have contributed original writing and poetry along with their favourite poems, excerpts from popular books, monologues, fables, songs, and parodies to translate their subconscious thoughts into the conscious realm.
Based on the poem ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’ by John Godfrey Saxe
The Blind Men and the Elephant is a 19th century fable that tells the tale of six blind men that encounter different parts of an elephant and each one describes it using their own perspective, only creating half truth, adding one piece to a big puzzle. Using these themes, this play explores the idea of success and what it means to each person. Is success getting full marks? Doing something consistently or doing your best at what you like to do? This is a devised performance and the dialogues reflect the student’s ruminations during the theatre sessions. They explore the various interpretations of success and raise poignant questions for the audience – What is success to you?
Based on Saadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh
Saadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh was first published in 1953. The story is a powerful satire on the partition of India; it depicts the physical, mental, and emotional trauma that comes from such a separation. Manto sets his story in a ‘lunatic asylum’ thus taking the theme of the partition to the world of insane, bringing to fore, the absurdity of the whole act. During the process of adaptation, the children worked with the theme of separation and identified the personal ways in which we all experience it. This personal-political narrative will make you think about the idea of home, family, boundaries, and borders.
Vignettes with a twist
Adapted from Neil Simon's 'The Good Doctor' and Roger McGough's 'The Looney Little Life Show' and some original pieces.
This is the story of Antigone with modern sensibilities. The older spirit fired by her modern zeal to stand up for her rights as a young woman, against Creon, the new king and now the family patriarch, who in his zeal to usher in a new world order, ends up crushing both the voice of the young and the old, caught in his own contradictions.
In this 21st century adaptation of the 500 BC Greek tragedy, the historic chorus, with its ancient role of lyrical commentary and philosophic voice of the community, morphs into the media, the state sponsored faction, which governs and manufactures mass opinion, serving as a mouthpiece of Creon's propaganda while one of the chorus members becomes the contrarian voice from within the media fraternity, which prods active questioning of the news being fed, protecting freedom of speech in a state that is being engulfed by singular discourse and a totalitarian worldview.
The fundamental question that is raised is how far would you go in pursuit of something you believe in, even when the odds are heavily stacked against you?
An intersection between Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and popular fables & fairy tales, Tales from the Other Side: Untold Histories and Hidden Truths, re-examines six stories where characters find themselves on the outside. What happens when the ugly duckling decides it no longer wants to be ugly? And who really is the big bad wolf? These tales will make you reconsider what you believe to be the truth! Entirely performed by young adults, this thought provoking retelling performance is suitable for all ages 7 years and above.