Surviving Pre-Production for the Ramayana

This past week we have been working on adapting the Indian play, The Ramayana, which will be our school play for 2015. On Monday we presented our power points to the rest of the class, of our adaptation for our part of the Ramayana. The task was to analyze, and thus adapt an specific part of the play, which in my case was act 7: "Hanuman's Prank". We had already discussed previously altogether an overview of the entire play, but each one of us had analysed their part more in depth. After presenting, we discussed about every presentation, and moved on to our second task, joining the entire adaptation into one power point, and present our proposal of the play. We spent two days joining the power points into one, but also considering the different changes. For example, there were some ideas we didn't like someone proposed in their part, so we discussed it and voted upon it. Also, we made sure everything made sense, and that there was a reason for it to be like that. Finally, on Thursday afternoon, we had our second pre-production meeting, in which we planned the first rehearsal of the play, that takes place this Tuesday the 17th.
Personally, i think this task was quite exhausting, but interesting nonetheless. When i presented my power point, i felt a bit insecure of my adaptation, since the play is extremely long, and i wasn't completely sure if i was taking a lot off the play or not enough, for it to be appropriately adapted from a 9 hour play, to an hour and a half one. By the time all presentations were done, i was confident we were doing a good job, i felt that we had properly adapted the play, and i was in almost complete agreement with every one's proposal. However, i still felt that we were missing something, that there was some void in our play that we needed to fill in. I guess this feeling comes from the fact that this is our first time doing this, and we just have to trust our judgements. Joining the power points together was a bit more work than i thought it would be, because i was thinking it would be just a copy paste work and a bit of editing, but i was wrong. Everyone had a different way of presenting their work, so we had to edit everything to fit the same format so it wouldn't be confusing. As for our pre-production meeting, it went pretty smoothly, and i feel that we did a great job, and the rehearsal is going to go amazingly. I do feel kind of sad and ashamed that I'm gonna miss half of the very first rehearsal, because of the BSP challenge, however i don't doubt for a bit that the girls are going to do a great job. Probably having two members absent, will impact the efficiency of the group, but I'm confident that they will manage to keep the situation under control, and i will help once i arrive.
Doing a work such as this is very different to whatever we've done before. We've never truly done a power point for theatre class, and now we learned how to do one properly in a new format, a skill that will be useful to survive the course. In theatre, it becomes quite useful to use presentations when trying to show your proposals to others more concisely. Adapting a play is really challenging, but the fact that we divided the work, and then joined it, proves that we are actually a good team, and we are able to share and discuss ideas to produce a wonderful product. When creating a play, you have to tie everything together, and there must be a reason for everything that happens for it to make sense. In which case, i learned that when adapting the play, you have to be careful not to untie something, such as leaving a blank space when deciding to erase something off. For example, we didn't want to explore a certain theme, so we had to take out all the parts that led to that theme so it would make sense and don't leave a void. Also, i learned that everything has to be justified, so when we took out the parts we didn't want off the play, we had to have a reason for it, further driving us to the actual adaptation. At some points, some changes we made had no reason for it, and giving one to it actually made the adaptation clearer and helped develop the next parts of the story. We still haven't developed a concept for the play, but i can see now that as our final adaptation comes clearer, so does the options for a concept. Another thing I find important is the fact that when the play can change a lot, but we have to be cautious with changing the important parts to keep the main ideas intact. Which makes me wonder, how can the great plays of the past be adapted over and over again in so many different and innovative ways yet they all manage to maintain the main ideals, themes and messages?