high performance...delivered

The picture is still very clear in my mind. It was the 27th of November, 2008. It was the same day when the proscenium workshop began; it was the day when international documentary films were screened at the college auditorium. It was about 4:30 in the evening when Mr. Vaz, asked whether they should throw me into ‘this.’ Till then I had no clue of what ‘this’ was. All the members of Script Peoples, a couple of old play-backers and I got together and the ‘Big’ news was cracked open by Mr. Vaz.

The multinational ‘Accenture’ had hired a team called ‘Deferens’ to have interactive sessions and to motivate their young BPO workforce. They contacted us to put up interactive plays for the employees of Accenture thus bringing out their problems and focussing on the values and the culture of work of the company. We needed to perform for over three weeks at Accenture offices spread across various parts of the country beginning from Bangalore to Noida to Chennai and Mumbai. This project was massive; both for Script Peoples and for me as a performer. 1 day into the playback theatre workshop, I was already preparing for my first interactive performance for thousands of BPO employees over the country. It was exciting.

We further worked on the script that same evening and came back the next morning to perform for the team from Deferens. In another couple of days, we were performing at Accenture Bangalore. I along with Saraswati, a fellow play-backer put up the first performance and we nailed it. It was the perfect start to a long, long journey. The memories of that first performance are still very fresh in my mind. It was a totally different experience for me. I had never before performed in an office space to people standing all around me. I had never performed to a responsive audience before. This time we were there just make conversation with them, that too while performing. It was a challenge, with over a couple hundred, bored and tired BPO employees, that too on a Monday morning all around us in their den, we needed to make merry. We did. We felt amazing after that first performance. It was like a rush of excitement which was just beginning to kick in. It just kept growing. Very soon, after another couple of performances I got used to the space, the dead, sleepy and tired faces of so many bored twenty-somethings.

The third performance was the only low-point of the entire journey for me. We worked really hard and got an absolutely dead audience, unresponsive, quiet, mum and disinterested. We needed to up ourselves a little for such crowds and we did, soon we found better ways of using the spaces, we started doing without the microphones. Went and probed in a little more, got them talking and had a blast wherever we went from there. It was an amazing feeling. I felt something maturing in me over every performance. There were innovative techniques and gestures that I would come up with after each performance. Very soon I found myself measuring the crowd before each performance and began varying my style accordingly.

The trip to Delhi was also another high point. The crowd was totally different from what we had performed to back here in Bangalore. We changed our lingo a little to go with the crowd and tried new things which worked well for us. My last performance, I must admit, was to the toughest crowd throughout the journey. But we hit a six off the last ball. We watched the ball disappear into the crowds and got the same runners high at the end of a run.

It was definitely one of the most unforgettable experiences for me. I entirely felt myself mature as an actor. Now, I feel great. Indeed, “HIGH” PERFORMANCE ... DELIVERED!