Reaching There

All the world's a stage. The Bard of Avon wrote these words in his play "As You Like It". On 15th April while I was on stage it felt like stage was the only world! The next seventy minutes were a stream of surreal moments. I felt like a kid, unscathed by the worldly ways. I did my fair share of mistakes but somehow things worked out at the end. How I ended up doing a play? I was part of a two months workshop conducted by Samahaara in Hyderabad. I almost missed it if not for a useless habit of browsing through my old emails! Perhaps the stars conspired for me and I ended up as part of this workshop. It was one of the best decisions I have made in my life so far. Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world! When German playwright Johann Wolfgang said these words he was referring to putting thoughts into action in our lives. Whew! I found out during the two months of training that ...

I was doing an improvisation scene with another actor. The objective of the "improv" was simple; to do a small talk with another actor with a motive to get money out of his pocket. At first it sounded like an easy thing to do; go out there and fleece this guy.  So I went in on the stage with "the goal" dwarfing everything else in my mind. A few minutes into the scene I was struggling for words. And why? I was too focused on my motive. The motive was handicapping my thought process. During the postmortem of the scene my teacher gave me the reason for my failure. I wasn't listening. I was too busy keeping the motive alive in my mind that I missed listening to my co-actor. Eventually I didn't have anything to react to! Robert Downey Jr said he hates motive, during an interview on "Inside an Actor's Studio" (a TV show I am a big fan of). I was definitely too engrossed in my motive to even think about anything else. Maybe it is good...