Class Summary

Class 5

    

    In our fifth class, some other materials have been added. Basically each student has received their own Greek stories, which then had to be transformed into dramas. For completing this task, we had to jot out the plots and characters we had in our mind. This time, we had to sit by the pond and do this task. After we returned to our classroom, we were instructed us to assume roles of strangers and act in a drama with a conflict-generating plot, which we had to design by ourselves instantly. The homework for this class are to write the whole drama for the plot that we jotted, and revisit the public places and include the updates accordingly. The "public places" homework has to be submitted on Thursday, and our teachers have instructed us to bring the hardcopy of the first assignment in the upcoming class.

Class 4

The very classwork from our third was repeated in our fourth class for the students who missed it. Additionally, we were given our portfolios, which contains a sample sketch of a stage design on a theatre, a poem on friendship, a number of small strips of papers of varying textures and sizes, a very old piece of paper-cutting, whose news has vanished by the time it reached us. 

More about Class 3

    Our third class was important on another note. We were taught that there are only seven types of dramatic plots: i) journey, ii) tragedy, iii) comedy, iv) overcoming the monster, v) rags to riches, vi) quest story, and finally, vii) rebirth. Based on these basic storylines, we had to write a story on the strip of papers that came with our portfolios. Afterwards we have read the poem included in our portfolio, and created characters and wrote dialogues for them. In turn, we had to design the set that we had in our mind for this action to take place at, using the sample sketch and a drawing by our guest teacher that he did instantly.     

     Class 3 

      In our third class, the students who were present, had to write fictional letters on real postcards issue by the postal department of Bangladesh. We wrote fictional letters to real addresses. For most of us this was our first experience of writing on a postcard. Writing on postcards offers quite a few unique possibilities: a) first, you are writing with a pen and it is expected to reach your reader in her/his physical address; b) secondly, writing on a postcard is also a bit intimidating because you are writing on a piece of paper which is openly delivered and there is hardly any scope of keeping your emotions and words private; c) the space on a postcard is extremely short and it requires a lot of planning for writing in such a small space; d) finally, it is great to know that our Post Office still issues such postcards for public use. However, we really doubted whether any people uses them at all. For homework, we were assigned to visit certain public places like hospitals, jail, local market, and launch terminal, to observe interactions that take place at such crowded places each day. 

Class 2 and 3

The second and the third class took place right outside our usual classroom setting, a thing we so excitedly loved. For many of us this was something we often fantasized but could never think that it might happen so casually. The class ended with a short lecture on developing characters and their importance. The homework has been repeated for the second time, as we have been instructed to revisit the public place of our choice, due to insufficient observations. 

Class 2

In our second class, we were introduced with our guest teacher. We were given a handout, which described the basic principles and attitudes that we should have as students of this course. Afterwards, we discussed the text, and the sub-texts and themes of Tagore’s The Post Office (translation by Devabrata Mukherjee). As part of take-home project, we did an 1800-word opinion-based analysis of the text. 

1.    Class 1

    In our very first class we were, we were introduced to our faculty member Dr. Mohammad Israfil who gave a brief outline for the course Playwriting – 505. We had a quick look at the translated version of Rabindranath Tagore's Dakghar (Post Office), available in Project Gutenberg's database. We were asked to read this text, as well as to choose a drama that we liked.