Every semester, students from the second and third year choose an elective for one week, doing something different from what they are otherwise working towards. This July, they chose between theatre, dance, virtual reality, and weaving as a welcome break from their otherwise intensive schedules. We were lucky to have passionate experts from each field who brought something particular from their own work to share with the students. Each elective had about 20 students and with the entire week to their disposal, the students got to engage with their mentors at ease.
Here are the posters of each elective followed by notes/reflections by the students.
Ruchi Dixit writes
“The drama games and improvisation elective made us look beyond words as the only way of expressing ourselves. It was about understanding human behavior and overcoming our weaknesses. This elective helped us gain confidence and come out of our comfort zone. Each day started with warm-up games which were about focusing, being patient, understanding and then reacting. Among many games, the most fun was, improvising an advertisement. Later, we ended by presenting a drama which had the idea of Gibberish, which as we understood means that language is not the only aspect, but rather it is about how you can connect with a person through actions and emotions. In this drama we mimicked our faculty and presented it to the whole school, we called it ‘Everyday at SEA’. The drama presented what a typical day at SEA is like and the relationship and bond that we have with our teachers.”
Photographs from the elective held in the stilt area and the final performance where each student is standing next to the faculty member they mimicked.
Nikeita Saraf writes
“The elective started off with bouncing our ideas about dance and what makes us dance. Our notions about what the module would be were broken during the first exercise itself, wherein we traced a space around ourselves and moved and progressed within that space by ‘listening to our body’. Through various exercises and discussions, we discovered the difference between dancing and being in dance. We recognized the body as merely an identity in space which could be recognized in terms of its color, gender, geography, and movements. These movements of an identity were then explored as entities that can alter the dynamics of a space by projecting, cutting, expanding and closing it.
The elective was an understanding of self, discovering individualistic and personal body dialogues that one poses with respect to another.”
Photographs from the elective where Sanjukta guided the students on a journey and as students put it, it was like a week of ‘therapy’, and the final performance they presented to the school.
Nikunj Dedhia writes
“The Weaving Furniture workshop focused on the practice of upcycling of waste material and using it to its best application. It also involved a visit to Anu Tandon’s workplace where we got exposed to the various methods of weaving and opened up to how an everyday object can be imagined through weaving.
The materials used to make the furniture pieces at school were primarily scrap from the kabadiwalas and also industrial waste that we sourced ourselves.”
Photographs of the initial explorations of two knots on a frame and the different products the students made, including a lamp, seats with tires, a chair and a storage unit for the library.
Ashwin Gupta writes
“The Virtual Reality elective involved, experiencing architectural projects to their full scale by exploring and creating landscapes and built forms digitally, and further adding elements for a more realistic experience. This was done by introducing spatial sounds in some, and a virtual user- interactive experience by merging the projects with simple shooting games, all done in a real-time game rendering software, Unreal Engine. Followed by an experience on an Oculus Virtual Reality headset, with pre-defined teleportation to the target viewpoints, to establish the chronology of circulation through the spaces.”
Photographs of students experiencing their own designs on Virtual Reality.
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