a little bullying and a whole lot of wisdom

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. The past couple of days have been packed (which is partly why I needed a day off from reflection) and I'm quickly learning that skipping a day of blogging results in obscenely long posts.

Because it makes sense chronologically, I'll start with The Amen Corner. I have recently discovered that when a piece of theatre really affects me, I feel no emotions whatsoever during the piece, and then they all come out during curtain call, when I become an uncontrollable, blubbering mess. That's what this show did to me. The show featured an entirely black cast (with the exception of one white extra with no lines) but managed to not be a play about race. That in itself would be enough to make the play groundbreaking, but grace with which it handled the complex issues of gender, religion, and their roles in society was jaw-dropping. I wish I could wrap my head around this play more than I've been able to; I want to borrow the script from the library and really dig into it to help me process. Honestly, I was too distracted by the acting (the best I've seen in a really long time) to really figure out what this play was saying to me. 

And now onto Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business. The past two days of this camp have been a total roller coaster. Although everyone in the camp auditioned to be there, Monday was mostly focused on learning materials so they could audition for specific parts. Needless to say, the tension between the pre-teen girls (and a few of the boys, though they were much more relaxed about it) auditioning for three lead parts was palpable all day. We cast at least three people in each part, so as to avoid any bad feelings, but still, the characteristic pre-teen nasal singing and jazz hands were out in full, cutthroat force yesterday. I don't mean to imply that these kids are nasty at heart - they're actually a really fantastic group of people - but the circumstances on Monday were definitely tense enough to induce some tears.

As our teaching artist, Ed, wisely pointed out, once one kid opens the "crying door" and establishes that ethos in the room, emotions continue to run high, even later in the week. We saw that today, when not one but two boys ran out of the room crying while we staged one of the dance numbers. It turns out our rehearsal room has a bit of a bullying problem, which absolutely breaks my heart. Days like today make me worry that I'm a little too sensitive to teach kids, or at least ones this young. Ed insists on not calling attention to the bullied kids by babying them, which makes a lot of sense, but goes against all of my sympathetic instincts to stop everything and have a long talk about feelings. It's hard to play down a sobbing child, but doing so kept the group on task and allowed us to finish everything we wanted to accomplish today. We had a great talk with the group at the end of the day that will hopefully end our bullying woes, but I guess we'll see.

I'm fascinated by this group of kids, whose energy is endless but never really focused in the direction we'd like it to be. One boy in particular decided that he was trapped in a cardboard box halfway through our music rehearsal, and developed a really brilliant pantomime act of dragging himself and the box around the room and attempting to break out with a laser, a box cutter, and even at one point a grenade (nothing worked - this was one strong cardboard box). I didn't want to discourage him, since it was truly one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time, and I admired his creativity, so I tried to keep him on task by asking him if there was hole in the box so we could still hear him sing during our music rehearsal. There was. I'm so impressed by his and the rest of the group's creativity in and out of rehearsal, and am surprised to find how much I like working with this age group, despite the seemingly endless difficulties that they present.

After camp today we had an "artist hour" with CTC's education director. I have never been more excited about the field of arts education than I was today, listening to Debra talk. She told us a little about her background and how she turned CTC's programming around three years ago when she started here. We then bombarded her with questions, and a few of the pearls of wisdom she gave us are paraphrased below:

• If you're going to be an administrator in an education department without also being an educator, you will mess it up. You can't handle problems based on policy alone; you have to be with the person who's presenting you with the problem and work with them to solve it. It's important to imagine yourself as the teaching artist in the room and solve problems as you'd want them solved in that setting.
• Learning about theatre is learning about theatre. You don't need to tie your education programming to the mainstage season; in fact, it's really not necessary. The decision a family makes to go see a show is a very different decision from the one to send their child to a workshop or a camp - sending your kid to a workshop is often much more based on word of mouth from trusted sources, because it's a far greater monetary and time commitment than seeing a show is. An education department's primary goal can't be to get audiences for the mainstage season.
• As a director in an educational setting, your resume can't depend on the show's success. It's not your show, it's a collaborative effort. On some level, process and product are not separate entities, and they should inform one another.
• The benefit of theatre training doesn't come from training kids to be actors, it comes from training kids to think like actors. Whether they choose theatre as a career or not, teaching people to think like actors teaches them to think creatively and consider many points of view.
• If you're interested in education, your training matters far less than your experience. You can know as much as possible about teaching techniques, but if you've never stepped into a classroom before, you'll freeze up the second things stop going as planned. (This reminded me of a piece of advice Betsy Quinn gave me this spring: "teach the kids, not the lesson plan.")

The hour was so packed with information that I'm positive I've missed a number of things Debra shared with us, and if I remember them, I'll make sure to share. Her talk was the perfect way to end a pretty stressful day, and got me excited to go back and tackle this bullying issue.