Main Dramatics GC

23rd – 24th October, 2010
LT

The main dram GC in its new avatar – split into 2 days for the very first time to ensure longer rehearsal times with lights, definitely lived up to its expectations. 13 plays, each as good as the other. Well just to judge which one was better than the rest, we had a very distinguished panel of judges:
1. Mrs Rashi Bunny – a thorough veteran in the field of theatre, she has been a director, a writer and a very skilled actor for indeed a very long time. She has certain very distinguished accolades to her name including Top 50 emerging icons of India
2. Mrs. Aditi Sharma – a professional theatre actor for the last 12 years, she has been a co-writer and actor of the winning play at Thespo, one of the more prestigious theatre competitions with a Best supporting actress award to her name.
3. Mr. Saurabh Pathak – A professional theatre actor himself, he has been involved in training actors for theatre and cinema for the past 15 years at the Roshan Taneja foundation for Performing Arts.

Kudos to all the efforts put in by the hostels!! Their week long preparations could be surely seen on stage.

THE RESULTS!!

1st:
Mimansa – Hostel 9

2nd:
Hawaalat – Hostel 6

3rd:
He, Me and She – Hostel 13

4th:
Chui Mui – Hostel 10

5th:
Usne Kaha Tha – Hostel 2

Best Actor 1: Siddharth Gupta (Sid) [H9]
Best Actor 2: Aparna Malaviya [H11]

Congrats to all the winners!!
The dram GC ended with H6 as the overall winner.

The judges were completely astonished by the performances as they said that they did not expect it from us. Seeing the potential, the judges have left with some really good news for us:

1. Mrs Rashi Bunny has voluntarily agreed to conduct a workshop for us. Besides, seeing the potential, she is even interested in directing us for a play
2. Mr Saurabh Pathak, a theatre actor trainer, has agreed to give us 10-12 days of his time to help us out with a certain play in whichever way we want
3. Mrs. aditi sharma has said that she shall be available to IIT for whatever kind of help we require for developing dramatics here be it professional help or be it conducting workshops.

Looking forward to a more improved dramatics culture at IITB.

Up next:
IIT Bombay Theatre Fest 2011: 12-16 jan 2011

Technicals Session by Sameer Mishra

Tuesday, 19th October 2010
Yoga Room

The judges of last year’s Main Dram GC had made a comment, “You’ll are a tech institute and almost all the plays messed up in technicals. Funny”. Keeping this mind, several measures were taken to ensure a better level of technicals this year at the Main Dram GC, the first of them being this session by Sameer Mishra.

Technicals in theatre basically involves the correct and efficient usage of lights, sounds and prod during a play. The session mainly concentrated on the use of lights and sound. Sameer started off with describing the importance of lights in a play and how they can be used to create different effects on stage, even without the presence of any kind of prod. He showed examples from previous IITian plays as to how light was and can be used to potray sometimes different moods, sometimes emotions and sometimes even various characters.

He moved on to sound where he mentioned about how much time in a play should there be background music, how does one choose which soundtrack to play and how can live music be put in effectively.

It surely was an insightful session and people attending it will definitely agree. The session certainly proved its significance as this session coupled with the extra time given to hostels for practicing by splitting the GC into 2 days, resulted in a much sound usage of technicals this year as compared to last time around!

Technicals session (use of lights and sound in plays) by Sameer Mishra

Hey everyone,
With Main Dram GC around the corner, we will be holding a techincals session i.e. session on usage lights and sound in plays. It will be conducted by our very own Sameer Mishra 😀

Date: Tuesday, 19th October
Time: 9pm
Venue: Yoga Room

Will surely turn out to be an interesting session as we generally tend to screw up in techincals. 😛
See you all there!!

Ad Making GC

30th Sept,
Yoga Room

A really new concept of making a live ad came in the form of a formal GC event, the Ad-Making GC. This was held with the motive of attracting sophies in large numbers to the dramatics scene as it earlier happened in Socials. And it surely did serve the purpose as the rule of 3 entries per hostel and no limit on the participants’ number in a particular entry saw a participation of over 250 people!

A 2 minute ad with a live jingle compulsory definitely pushed the cretaitivity of the IITians to quite an extent. As expected it proved to be a thoroughly entertaining event with some ads teasing your comic side while the others “issued in public interest” .Our alumni Yash Kumar and Rivaldo were kind enough to come all the way to judge the event despite it being the day of the Ayodhya verdict.

The results:
1st Place
Hostel 3: Marker

2nd Place
Hostel 6: Fevicol

3rd Place
hostel 7: Dabangg Soap

4th Place
Hostel 10: Agarbathi

5th place
Hostel 2: Maggi
Hostel 4: Kayamchuran

Congos to all the winners!

Freshie Prod event report

25th sept,
Yoga room

1 evening, 11 awesome plays. Some were street plays while the others one-act. Yoga room was thronged with audience to watch the talent of freshmen .The event was “Freshie Prod”, the very first time the freshers take stage to perform a prepared play. Many sophies and thirdies toiled hard over the previous week to mentor these freshers  to plays which have been earlier performed in IIT. The event was judged by our very own seniors,  Shubhanshu and Puneet Bagla, who indeed had a really tough time deciding the winner. In the end it was “Bolti duniya” of hostel-4 and “Mera Bharat Mahaan” of Hostel 2 who stood joint 1^st followed by “Jaago Jaago Jaago” of Hostel 10 and “23 March, 1931” of Hostel 2 in joint 3^rd place. It was really good to see the participation of the freshies in such a large nummber as well as in such enthusiasm. One thing was confirmed that night that dramatics of the institute has really good future with such talented and enthusiast freshmen.

Freshie Prod @ Freshiezza

We’ll be having our Freshie Prod today.
Freshie prod is the stage where our freshies take the stage to do a prepared dram for the very first time.
Our sophies and thirdies have been working really hard with the freshies over the past few days to put up this event.
There are 11 plays being put up by Hostels 1,2,3,4,10 and PG freshies.
I request all of u to come and attend this event. IT surely has awesome performances in store for u.

Date: Today, 25 September
Time: 3pm
Venue: Yoga Room

See you there!!

Professional Ad Making Workshop by Mrs Gita Sashidharan

Thursday, 23 September 2010
Hostel 3 Lounge

With the Ad making GC around the corner, Fourth Wall conducted an ad making workshop by a professional,
Mrs. Gita Sashidharan to give the students insights on how to go about the entire event.

This was the first under the new initiative of Hostel-to-Hostel workshop program. The idea of this program is to bascially invite 2 representatives from each hostel to attend a workshop who can then replicate the same workshop in their respective hostels. This is considering the fact that professionals generally limit the number of people in a workshop to 25-30. To reach out to more students, this seems to be a a good idea.

A brief profile of Mrs. Gita

• Partner of a self founded, Public Relations, Branding, Events & Corporate Training firm called VBuzz Communications.
• Has had a long stint of advertising as client service executive with Lintas, Calcutta.
• Freelanced for several advertising agencies in developing copy for ads and handled public relations work by developing internal communication tools such as in-house journals and newsletters for several companies.
• Has been in the field of corporate training for the last 18 years.
• Academician and teach in several colleges in Mumbai for the students of the undergraduate & postgraduateprogram in Mass Media & Management studies

With certain pains in the original venue and after 2 shifts of venues, the workshop finally began in Hostel 3’s lounge.
Mrs. Gita, an extremely cooperative and charming woman, waited patiently while we sorted out all things.

The workshop finally began as an interactive session telling the students all that goes into ad making. From how could one choose a product, to getting things right, making it suitable for the audience, how to write jingles etc.  The students too enjoyed the workshop asking infinite quiestions as GIta Ma’m tackled each one patiently and convincingly. Her long career in ad making made the workshop even more interesting as she stated out examples from her past experiences. Towards the end, she mentioned a few exercises which the students could do when conducting the workshop in their respective hostels.

Overall, the workshop was an awesome learning experience and hope the students can forward all that they learnt to their hostels as well.

Theatre Games Session and Thespo Meet

Hey everyone,
We’ll be having our first Theatre Games session followed by a meet for Thespo discussion

Date: Thursday, 23 Sept
Time: 8.30 pm
Venue: Yoga Room

All are welcome. Please be there!

Fourth Wall goes professional! Invited by Mckinsey and CO. to perform for their clients @ LAVAASA!

Fourth Wall, the dramatics club of IIT Bombay is certainly acquiring new heights!
We were recently approached by the very renowned McKinsey and CO.  to perform a street play for the corporate junta.

It was basically a part of a 3 day event organized by McKinsey and Co. for their clients, at Lavaasa (a beautiful, planned hill station) where they invited top 150 managers from a leading national bank. Mckinsey was promoting some of there new fundaes for the banking sectors. To drive these points home with greater impact, they were looking for some cultural associations to the theme and wanted us to present these concepts through our medium of street plays to promote this MINDSHIFT

They wanted the team to first give a demo to see if we had what they were looking for.
They loved our concept and performance such that they requested us to prepare not one but two plays.
And so the team packed their bags to a fully paid trip to Lavasa to perform.

Writers:

• Gabbar – Ashish
• Kataria
• Chandan
• Samarth Mohan

Actors:

• Gabbar – Ashish
• Samarth mohan
• Richa Gwalani
• Mayank Mangal

Music:

• Kumar Saurabh (freshie on congo)

The performance was really appreciated by the audience there who were certainly in for a surprise with this new medium of awareness spreading.
The team too enjoyed their stay there with wonderful hospitality from their side.

In all the trip was a truely awesome experience and certainly a “Once in a lifetime experience“.

Looking forward to more such opportunities in the future!!

Monoacting @ Freshiezza

5th September, 2010
Yoga Room

Some acted, some mimed, some narrated while the some did mimicry as the audience admired. The freshies displayed a mixed bag of all possible forms of monoacting in the their very first prepared dramatics competition – Monoacting.  Monoacting’s purpose was to give freshies a platofrm to display their acting, by taking the stage for 5 minutes completely to themselves. The event saw 35 entries, way more than anticipated such that the venue had to be changed due to shortage of time availability. The entire event was judged by a very patient Kataria, who sat there for almost four hours marking and giving comments to each and every performance.

Overall, another successful event pulled off which brought to light some really talented freshies! Hoping to see them perform at bigger stages soon.