Living Entrepreneurship Blog / The Arts

A Dancer Writing Her First Play

Shamoyita Mukherjee: Art… a feeder to the brain, body and soul. Unlike other MBA students of the country, Babson MBA students get a chance to ‘creact’ in their first few weeks of school. As a part of the 2014 batch, Babson had put all 169 of us into artistic groups that we have never had any experience with. Dancers were put in writing, actors were put in music and painters were put in acting. I had never written in my life. I have danced since I was a child and I still do performances and teach as well, but it requires no writing. However, soon enough I realized that our 12 member team that was to do dramatic writing had never written.  I was not the only nervous soul in the room.

We were assigned a consultant who introduced us to writing plays and monologues.  The first exercise was quite refreshing after a stressful accounting and entrepreneurship class. We wrote monologues.  It was interesting to see how funny and engaging our monologues were. Also I thought to myself “After all, we have all written essays before coming to school.”

For the purpose of the school we had to write and perform a play. We brainstormed for about eight hours on day I, fought and exchanged opinions and finally decided on a topic based on what we enjoyed talking about in the discussions. So, “Billy the Beaver” was born and was the protagonist of our drama.

A great show followed numerous hours of practice and brainstorming and improvisations. We all enjoyed the performance on 21st September but what I loved most was the debrief we had after the performance. Every individual came up and said that they had found an interest in art. We created entertainment, delivered art and in the process pushed each other to edges we had never seen ourselves in before. The courage displayed was tremendous! Kudos to everyone!