Tai Chi Lessons

Here are some more notes regarding our acting lessons:

Our teacher- He is a strange one: an interesting combination of West and East. One the one hand, he has never been out of India, and has a more than healthy appreciation of Eastern spirituality. However, he also has a very Western way of talking about things, and is somewhat obsessed with talking to the few Westerners in the class. This leads to an understandable confusion. However, there are other strange paradoxes in the class, such as the friendliness and laughs of the teacher alongside the supposed seriousness of the exercise. This actually manifests itself in a bigger paradox, which I’ll now explain.

This paradox is the purpose of our “acting lessons.” The first side is that of the theatricality of teaching. Professor Kumar (our director) continues to stress the importance of acting in class (examples: putting on the “front of democracy” regarding classroom rules that you have created, teaching the children in a creative way, pretending to be an intimidating figure). Theoretically, the acting lessons would encourage this form of acting, in order to make us better teachers, right? But these lessons are based on principles from Tai Chi, telling us to “find our inner self” and look inwardly. Therefore, there is this incredible confusion in purpose, as we look inwardly and act outwardly at the same time. It seems like two different philosophies are in competition, regardless of the fact that Professor Kumar hired the man to have an acting workshop on more than one occasion.