Summer Express is a series of niche workshops at Ranga Shankara that are conducted for the children of Bangalore every year. With Summer Express, Ranga Shankara strives to bring the finest faculty from across the country together and seeks to enrich the young blood of the city.

This year, it was no different. Summer at Ranga Shankara offered the kids a variety of options to experience new things. From traditional games to eating right, from puppets to cars, we had it all.

The workshop on Exploring Folk Tales through Theatre and Exploring Folk Tales through Puppetry by Padmavati Rao saw children stretching their imagination. Puppets were made, characters developed and dialogues cooked up impromptu. It gave children their own space to explore what lies within them. The final presentation made them comfortable and confident on stage.

The photography workshop helped children polish their skills and gave a proper direction to their hobby. Apart from understanding composition and point of view, they were explained about the principles of physics working on the camera and how a twist to the aperture and the focal length could give them much better results.

While the photography workshop explained the principles of science directly, the Science Toys workshop by Arvind Gupta gave the kids a chance to understand science through application. Toys using the simple laws of physics and chemistry were made out of scrap material and these toys were cherished by the kids. They went back home a little more in love with the subject.

On the arts front, we had a workshop on Theatre Songs (Ranga Geethegalu) by Kalpana Nagnath. She had kids from varied backgrounds, some already trained in music whereas others who were struggling with the local language. But she exercised great patience with all and the kids also put in great effort and sincerity which was quite evident from the show put up by them on the last day.

Over the ten days of the workshop titled Performing English Theatre in Indian traditions, Neeraj worked closely with the children, getting into their systems and transforming minds as he put it. The attempt of this workshop was to break through these barriers and transform these kids. The bigger challenge was to break the barriers unreasonably imposed upon us and transform the minds (and to a large extent body) of these children. And we must confess that on the last day, we all stood in awe as the transformation was already visible!!!

Sriranjini's workshop on Traditional Indian games gave a lot of insight to kids on the board and other kinds of games played centuries ago and the kids found it quite fascinating and started making their own colourful boards.

Anita Salim conducted a workshop on Arabian Nights and she put in a lot of dedication and hardwork along with the volunteers to bring out the best in the kids. Beautiful posters, masks and props were made and at the end of it each girl felt like a princess and each boy like a prince out of the fairy tales.

Anju Surdarshan from the Cafe at Ranga Shankara conducted a Eat Right workshop for children where they learnt how to make yummy but equally healthy and nutritious dishes.

The workshop by Kirtana approached theatre by working on body, voice and mind. Three specific skills were brought: Kalaripayattu (the martial art from Kerala), Konokol (for rhythm), working with Scripts: The Basics of Direction; helping participants understood the multidimensional aspect of theatre!

Mythology and stories play an incredibly important role in our lives and children often can connect to mythology in an extremely profound and creative way since their imagination is yet not subject to reason. The workshop by Abhishek Kumar aimed at exploring these very connects, interests and at creating performances. This was one of the few workshops which had a simple approach but left the kids with something to think about.

The summer workshops concluded with an interesting workshop on Cars which practically took kids under the hood. Suresh from Advaith Hyundai spent three days with the kids explaining the dynamics of the car engine and its mechanism with the aid of diagrams, videos and practical sessions around a car. While the first two days were spent understanding the various parts and functioning of a car, on the last day they were taken to the Hyundai service station where they experienced the entire drill firsthand.

The positive feedback from the kids, parents and their eagerness to come back next year gives us the required momentum to keep the show running and to make each year better than the last one.