After my research i roughly knew that i wanted to work with traditional Indian textile techniques, with stories ( maybe indian mythology?) and possibly with a deeper concept ( such as death), and how that could be introduced to kids.
However, i began to feel that i was spending too much time reading and exploring the topics in my head. It was time to go talk to and spend time with kids doing some fun things and talking about related topics.
The workshop was planned for a small school named Shibumi. I got a bunch of 12 super enthusiastic kids to work with. The energy they brought with them was so inspiring!
Some Questions that i wanted to explore through the workshop:
- What aspects of myths are kids today drawn to the most?
- what kind of characters do kids find fun and cool? what captures their interest.
- What are the super powers that they would want or they find interesting?
- what are their imaginary stages like, and what environments do they create for their play?
- how do kids respond to traditional textile techniques such are tie dye and blockprint?
-what are they uses of it and how does that compare to the traditional uses?
We started the session with reading out some stories from the Ramayan. Most of the kids seemed to be fascinated by the fantastical nature of the characters. so we went to read some short stories about various rakshashas, such as Ravana, Bakasura, Yama. We continued to speak about what these Rakshashas are, and what could they signify. Maybe rakshasha were used to explain large issues that the human mind could not explain- such as death, greed, jealousy. Or maybe they just made stories fun, 'because there is no fun if a story with good didnt have evil'
They next drew out a monster/ Rakshasha of their own. They each gave their monster a name, some special powers and wrote a little description of its character.
The outcomes of this exercise were so pleasantly surprising and void of gruesomeness or blood thirst! The kids came up with the most interesting and thoughtful creatures. there were tornado creating monsters, and monsters that went around with water guns:)
I will soon put up details of each one, in the next post.
the next step was to find and make material to create puppets out of our sketches.
This is where i introduced them to tie and dye as a method to create interesting textures and patterns on their cloth for their creatures. many of them didnt understand the process , however i think this was nice, and the results were more magical to them.
There was so much excitement and enthusiam to create and explore. They insisted on doing everything on their own and went around collecting different materials to tie in their fabric. There was no sense of ownership, and they readily helped and sold their ideas to one another.
tying the fabric
Each of them tied a piece of cloth for them selves an then we died them in the two different colours we had.
dyeing the fabric
the kids were so excited just looking at their tied pieces of cloth and the shapes that they made , that the thought of opening it up wasnt very appealing until i told them that there was a bigger surprise awaiting them.
The best part of the workshop i can say hands down, was the next morning when we opened the fabric out. All day there was so much excitement to open the knots that i had a hard time sending them back into the classes. finally when we opened them - the expressions! everytime white patterns would begin to magically appear as we opened the blue cloth, how the eyes would light up! and the squeals of joy. sigh!
The next step was to create the puppets. For this went went around hunting for materials outdoors and indoors. Things like beads, coconut bark, aracanut bark, stones etc were brought in.I quickly showed them how to create some block print fabric so that they could incorporate that too.
Here are some of the ' Rakshasas' they created.
The 'Eyesome' monster
Vishwamitra
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