Mentor India: Eliciting Creativity using Music and Learning Body language with Street-Play
By far, we’ve been lucky to find guest teachers for Mentor India, who have been area experts. Week 4 was the one which stood out with sessions on music and street play. The sessions were based on music, which was conducted by Suhas Yogin and Vishwas Nayak, which was followed by a street-play, performed by Thrilochana and Suhas Narasimhan.
The Street-play focused on voice modulation, tone and body language. It involved a basic script on environmental conservation as well to create awareness. Kids were pushed to get into the field and express themselves freely, to help them build confidence. Using this as a stage, we chose two of our students to thank our sponsors of the week, Mr. Praveen Bhat—who celebrated his birthday by investing on us—and Deepthi Sanjiv— a journalist at Bangalore Mirror who featured us on the newspaper.
Hope you all appreciate the confidence and improvement seen amongst the kids in the following 70s video!
The music teacher, Suhas, wrote his experience down for us and it goes like this-
“If you work in the IT wild, your typical Saturday mornings would mean some of these things: waking up late, dazedly watching TV the whole day, eating Friday leftovers for breakfast, or not waking up at all. Essentially, it’s a day reserved for those of us who would think, doing something out of the ordinary is prohibitively expensive, effortwise. Imagine waking up early, driving to a remote village, and engaging hyper-active students on one such Saturday morning. Well, we did all of this and how!
On the 13th of February, though, with much fervor and excitement, Vishwas Nayak and I drove to Chikkarasinakere, Maddur Taluk. We were to engage students of Class 10, Senior Secondary High School of Chikkarasinakere, with a session that would best elicit their creative instincts. What better way to accomplish that than to teach, create, and perform music? Music thrives on creativity and it is a musician’s innate nature to create, and create freely.
Music, to a dilettante, can be vaguely explained as a heterogenous mixture of melody and rhythm. An often underrated and underrepresented aspect of music, rhythm is hard to teach, learn, practice and perform. Having set out to get the students started on rhythm, we knew that our task wasn’t going to be easy.
Unforeseeably however, the students displayed great enthusiasm and a tremendous appetite for learning something completely alien. Mind you, the chances of a question on rhythm making it to the final examination is slim.
We also managed to squeeze in a session on melody. The popular “Green Grass Grows” poem was first sang to the students to help familiarize with the format.
We then asked the students to recreate the melody by forming their own visual imagery. An essential part of the exercise was that the students had to use grammatically correct sentences while rewriting the poem. The students wrote, sang, drew and performed their melodies with great energy and much gusto.
To sign-off, it’s heartening to see the deep commitment team KYS at Mentor India are displaying. Although, their road ahead is daunting and the task seemingly gargantuan, the Mentor India initiative is indeed in safe hands.
Wishing you the best, ever!”
