Tracks to Clementine

Robot Eye

On the way home from school yesterday, I found myself thinking "huh, my eye feels a little funny." Turns out it was FULL OF BLOOD.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. It was just a little bleedy. Like, the left side of my left eye had one goopy run of clotted looking red creeping downwards. This morning the goopy bit is at my lower lid, but my eye is all pinky to the iris.

I am a vision.

Add to that the emergency dental work I had done on Tuesday (time for another root canal!) and the extreme dizziness that was yesterday afternoon and whaddya get:

I don't care! I'm going to France!

Plus, the high school show we did at the big green theatre yesterday was incredible. It made me all teary and proud.

Background: I and two other teaching artists were set up at three different schools. Two schools were in the west part of Our Fair City and the third in a district on the East-ish side. We spent seven days with our students, giving them writing prompts (journeys, rites of passage, witness, power, etc), infusing each with activities that also served to prep them for performance. We spent one week writing the script, then another week (ish) in rehearsal with our respective students.

The script was developed from all of the writing--this was initially the part that sounded the most daunting to we TAs, because it meant taking 40 journals worth of writing and weaving them together into one 30-minute script. But it worked! We spent many hours going through the books pulling text, laying the text all out by category, rearranging the words so they made a little story, and divvying up the lines by school.

Some lines were given to the student who originally wrote the words, but mostly we tried to obfuscate what who wrote what by giving the lines to a different school. Some of this we did because the lines represented different experiences (driver's license, lifeguard certificate), some because they were funny (seafood gumbo, passed notes), and some because they were disturbing (guns, date rape--you remember being a teenager, right?).

Armed with the scripts, we returned to our respective schools to rehearse. One school had all students participating, but the other two (one of which was mine) had only a portion of students who would be in the final perf (due to reasons beyond our control; most valid). Rehearsal was already tricky since we were always missing two-thirds of our actors, but even more difficult because just wrangling the kids to read loudly was a big job.

Yesterday rolled around and all three of us were, um, worried. (Did I already mention my bloody eye?) My school and another had no blocking; the third school had put in all sorts of movement work. We only had one rehearsal before the performance: and it worked! During our one rehearsal (which was also our tech rehearsal), we told the students we would only stop them if something went wrong and that they could move when it seemed like they should and respond to what happened around them.

Oh, and this was being performed on the set of the show currently running at the theatre, y'know, the divisive one about the girl from our neck of the woods killed in a foreign neck of the woods in which there is great conflict.

It was incredible. The basic blocking rules meant that we magically had students in exactly the right spots to create visual links to what they were saying. The kids stepped up and had acting moments--and they weren't all drama students. (By the way, the students were 9-12 grade, but mostly 11-12th.) We had a fifteen minute break before the perf, afterwhich we asked them to find a moment to have their head out of the script, a moment where they looked at the audience or made a connection with someone else on stage. And they did it!

There were about 50 people in the audience and we've already heard so many wonderful comments about how well it went. The post-play discussion was the strongest ever for a teen project (in my experience) because the audience asked questions beyond "how did you learn all that" and the kids were so connected to what they'd written. One girl said she'd never written before and now she wants to write a book. Another student said she remembered something that happened long ago because of what someone else wrote. Another student was surprised how so much of the writing could have been something he'd written, even though he didn't. Another was proud that he was given the opportunity to show adults what it is really like to be a teen.

There are things in the future that could make this project better and we get to have a debrief to determine just what. But right now all I need to do is be proud of what we did, of what the students did, of what we were all willing to do together.

I don't know how much anyone's life will be changed in the long run, but in those moments on stage something important happened.

And I was there.

Posted by Ida at April 5, 2007 11:50 AM