Sangae 2011

Clockwise
Picture 1: Picture of the seats from the stage. Same seats I'll be at come next year during graduation.

Picture 2: Trying my hand at a semi-artistic shot of our costumes HQ at UCC. (You decide how good it is!) We had the light-bulb mirrors, which should have evoked my sense of 'Whoa, very professional and stage like' but all I could think of was psychotic Natalie Portman smashing Mila Kunis into the same sort of mirrors in Black Swan. Other than that, I mostly remember how crowded and stifling it got when too many people were in it. How we used to relish the break we got right before the mayhem started and gossip-gossip about everyone else! And how that little bit of time was so therapeutic because we touched base with each other, see how everyone was holding up and have a laugh about the crazy things that went down.

Picture 3: What the stage looked like from the loading bay. The props go through these doors and kept backstage. If the job of the costumes team is tiring, the props team has it wayyyyy worse, honestly. To me, the worst bit is when they have to smash all of their hard work the minute the play is over. Months and months of effort and crap from people and time away from their social lives and family gets dismantled to be discarded once the curtain falls.

Picture 4: A tech run in the process. During these runs, the sound, lights and smoke machine gets tested. The effects team has to ensure that the sound is clear, the right amount of lights come on and that the smoke machine doesn't obscure any one on stage. And the effects are different for each scene. The actors and dancers have to be there too because they need to adjust to the vastness of the stage, mark their places for the dances and learn to work with the props. All about the technical aspects.

I honestly loved coming back. It was a much richer experience and just detailing everything above truly gives me a scope of how epic it really was. And there were some serious post-production blues. I used to see them on a daily basis. I stayed nights in school with them. I slept over at Navi's and Darsha/Divya's place several times. For that period of time, we forsook everything else and just concentrated on this. And because of that, we built confidants in each other. I remember coming to school on Monday feeling a little bereft, like there wasn't anything to look forward to. Luckily Darsha called and we had a good time chatting.

But that wasn't all. It seemed that we had to return to the bungalow! From which comes the next collage of pictures....

There was a call out to the props and costumes teams to clean out the last of our stuff and to get rid of whatever we didn't want. When we headed back there, evidence of our presence was still lying around as the pictures show. And the debris made it seem like it wasn't completely over yet, for a moment that is. Because it was all too soon that me and Darsha got done and we took our last walk out of that place.....

FINAL GOODBYE

Presentation partner for Advance Abnormal, DISHA GURNANI