First Performance Complete!

Friends,

Today we had our first performance at Gyan Pravah.  We have a few "snapshots" from students below, and, we will try to get some more posts and pictures up soon.  We have not had internet since arrival, which has made posting pictures impossible, and made sending updates very brief.  Look for more (we hope) tomorrow.

Team Kahani

Sam Bertken

     When we hit the road for the cultural center where we would be premiering our first presentation of Kahani, a traffic disaster struck.  For the most part, there is a general consensus among the group that the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a car or motorcycle in Varanasi is a suicidal notion (Lanny notably excluded).  However, this particular situation rivaled any experience we’d had so far on the road.  Our bus came to an intersection where there was a particularly packed traffic jam, owed mostly to a crane machine that had gone kaput—there was literally black smoke spiraling out of it.

     People were flooding the street, shouting at the driver different suggestions, auto-rickshaws darted around the mess, trying to pass through, a tractor pulled up between us and the road we intended to drive down; all the while the heat was pushing every liquid every liquid in our body out.  Eventually, we were forced to evacuate the bus and hoof it to the cultural center to start rehearsal.  The bus arrived over an hour later.  Needless to say, the refreshing air conditioning literally gave us a new wind to start rehearsal in earnest.

Jane Huffman

Three Days in Varanasi~Initial Images

     Bare feet, peeling mangoes with sticky fingers, crumbling red brick, large black cows with pedestrian right-of-way, brittle clay cups, young girls in freshly pressed school uniforms, smooches of red stage makeup on the rims of water bottles, yellow linen rippling in windows, deet and sunscreen, embroidery, monsoon rains speckling the windshields of auto rickshaws, underpants that never dry, the exchange of small colorful bills, deep-fried batter bubbling in scalding honey, a secret language of automotive honking, giant spiders with ulterior motives, the clapping of a generator, black starless night skies, friendly contemplative locals who tell me I’m beautiful, wafts of garbage and cumin and sweat and sweet flowers, goats on ghats and ghosts and gods, submitting to our surroundings, snuggling with sweating friends, a city of art, a city of color, and city of astonishing attention to detail.

Fiona Carey

     The sun sets early here, and all at once. When we came back from our first show, and clambered out of the yellow Nirman schoolbus, the whole campus seemed golden. I’ve been inside for every other sunset so far, and I wonder if it does that every night, the way in winter in Michigan there’s that narrow slice of the day as the sun fades and the blue makes the sky and the snow one thing.  I feel like that’s this trip—a narrow slice of time full of beautiful light. I have to remember not to look at my feet so much that I forget to see it! We have been on a few walks in the city so far, and I can cross the street. You just have to take a big breath and walk forward!

     Our first performance was charged with a lot of nerves, both theatrical and cultural. There were a lot of broad grins afterward as we all mingled, chai-shloshed, in the breezy, verdant gardens of the cultural center.