Free Reading of a New InterAct Play!

The summer is buzzing even when the blog is not! We've been working away like busy bees on our new play Voytto Tech: a scifi fable on bullying.  In fact, we are having our first public reading on Friday, July 15 at 7 pm at Kefa Cafe, 963 Bonifant Street in Silver Spring, MD.  Please come join us!  The space at Kefa Cafe is small, but we'd love to get a bunch of folks out to hear the play and join in the action--after all, it's an InterAct play, which means there  are LOTS of opportunities for audience InterActors to participate right from your seats.  And most importantly, we'd love your feedback.  This is an early draft of the play, and we want to hear your responses, questions, and feedback so we can make this play shine! So stay tuned for updates as we spin out into space and get the show ready for the school year. 

What's the play about?  Well, this new play for grades K-6 combines science, engineering, and technology with a strong anti-bullying message. Klipp Casey travels from a planet far, far away to study at Voytto Tech, the most famous science magnet school in the galaxy.  Right away, Klipp has trouble fitting at his new school, and becomes a target for bullying. What can Klipp do? Who can he go to for help? And what can anyone do about the crisis threatening the planet? 

 

The play is a collaboration between myself (Ali OK, General Director) and Ben Kingsland (Associate Artist and actor/playwright extraordinaire). I'm personally very excited about this piece; not only is it the first new play produced by InterAct since I became General Director, it's the first new InterAct play ever written by someone other than our founder, Lenore Blank Kelner. So we've got some pretty big shoes to fill!  Happily, we have a great, creative community of artists pitching in on this, including our veteran InterActors, bleeding-edge technology expert and gadget geek consultant, aerospace experts (including an honest-to-goodness retired rocket scientist) and more! Plus some excellent audio/visual creations by Aisha Jordan and Jordan Multimedia and some out-of-this-world music and sound effects by none other than Helen Hayes award winner Tom Teasley.  

Make Strong Choices!

Ali let me loose on my own group of 4th graders! I was to run my very own "Books Alive!" workshop. Please believe me when I tell you that I am a seasoned teaching artist and I've been working with children in theater for almost 5 years now, and yet I still get butterflies in my stomach whenever I start with a new group or with a new company, as InterAct still is to me.

Our "Books Alive!" workshop uses a children's book as the vehicle with which to engage young people in the world of drama! We tell the story and encourage the children to use their voices, bodies, imaginations, concentration, and cooperation to bring the story to life in a dramatic reenactment that turns everyone into characters in the story.

When I got to the school and entered the classroom, the children were thrilled to see me. Their regular teaching artist, Mr. Ben, was out of town, and I heard calls of "Our teacher is new!", "She's a girl!", "I hope she's like Mr. Ben!", and "I want to hear a new story!". I caught their excitement quickly and couldn't wait to get started. I introduced myself as Ms. Bess and immediately focused them on warming up their bodies and voices, imagination, concentration and cooperation.
I am always fascinated at the way children of this age group can let go of themselves in a way many adults cannot. Children don't need to give themselves permission to take on the body of Anansi the Spider or roar with the voice of Lion or laugh with the charisma of Hyena, the way adults do. They are uncensored because they don’t yet know, or maybe just don’t care, about what is proper versus silly, weird versus normal, or calm versus disruptive, and in a class like this silly and weird and loud are all some of the best things you can be! Kids simply need to be invited to do it, and when they don't hold back the results can be inspiring to watch!

I really think many adult performers (and maybe just adults in general) can take a cue from these lively young 4th graders! In the world of theater it is better to make a strong choice than no choice at all, and maybe that’s true of life in general as well!

Big, boisterous, bouncing spring

I love the springtime here in the back yard of the nation's capital.  Here in the DC/MD/VA area, the spring months have been a time of dramatic change, wildly ricocheting temperatures and riotous, beautiful growth.  Even my poor neglected front yard garden has come to live in a big, boisterous way:

Here at InterAct, spring has also been a time of boisterous, riotous growth and whirlwind action. Sadly, it turns out our blog requires a little more tending and TLC to thrive than the hardy hostas out front (seriously, look at those things! They've gotten so big, you can't even see that there's a third striped hosta in the middle dying to break out from under his big brothers).

Happily, with the frenetic hurlyburly of spring winding down, and some exciting projects in the works, we're resolved to become better blog gardeners. Especially since we have so many stories to share and celebrate. Here are just a few of my own springtime adventures in arts education during the past few weeks:

• New Play: We began collaboration on our new featured production for next school year, a brand new original play developed by InterAct artists, set to premiere in September. The play is a scifi fable on bullying, set against a backdrop of interplanetary environmental and tech issues.  It started with two folks who were keenly interested in examining bullying through a theatrical lense who just happened to be scifi geeks, and has spiraled from there into a freewheeling, energizing collaboration among theatre artists, technicians, audiovisual experts, codemonkeys, scifi aficionados, amateur futurists, bleeding-edge technology enthusiast and an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist.  I for one cannot wait to see what happens!
• New Artists:  The spring has brought us some wonderful new artists to join our merry band of artists and arts educators.  And with that, exciting new programs for schools and communities. Watch for the announcements, coming soon!
• The Bully Menace at NYU/Steinhardt: Since our new play is looking at bullying (through our scifi lens), I've been voracious about any resources related to bullying--especially in the context of arts and arts education.  So, when NYU/Steinhardt hosted "The Bully Menace", a one-day symposium on the use of process drama to explore issues about bullying, I hopped the train to take it in, and came back with my brain buzzing with ideas.     
• Parent-Child Workshops on Bullying:  Inspired and set ablaze by my Bully Menace experience, I was determined to put some of these strategies to work. Enter Cassandra Redding, Kids on the Block Coordinator with the Mental Health Association of Montgomery County. Together, we collaborated on a parent-child workshop about bullying for our partners at HIP Kids, a family literacy with the Housing Initiative Partnership.  The evening centered around information sharing, process drama and some powerful discourse about the issues.  The most powerful part of the evening was watching the parents really experience an eye-opening moment as they listened to their kids discuss the issue...it was a great learning experience for all of us. In fact, the evening was so rich, Cassandra and I are putting our heads together to see how to package this program for other schools and communities. Stay tuned!   
• Grants, grants, grants....Anyone working in arts education in Maryland will tell you that April - May is the major grantwriting season: application deadlines for all sorts of state, county and foundation funding opportunities are in April and May. InterAct provides as much grantwriting assistance as possible for all of our partners, so this has been a busy, busy time for us.
• One Theatre World: National conference of TYA-USA. TYA-USA is a national service organization for theatre for young audiences. InterAct Story Theatre joined this year, and so as our General Director I went to their One Theatre World conference in Seattle. The conference coincided with the excellent Giant Magnet International Children's Festival , so we got to connect with fellow TYA professionals and see some real rock-star programs from around the world for kids. Me? I geeked out like a fangirl over keynote speaker Tim Webb, the kidtheatre genius behind the visionary work of Oily Cart in the UK.
• And, of course, the everyday arts ed adventures: through all this, we've been doing performances, workshops and residencies in schools all over the place.

What's ahead? More collaboration, more growth, and exciting changes ahead.  And definitely, more gardening...both in my patch of dirt and on this blog.

Ooh, shiny! InterAct's new website goes live

When I first became General Director of InterAct two years ago, just in time for the recession (more on that another time), one of the things I promised was that we would beef up our web presence and social media. Little did I know at that time how much time, effort, and caffeine goes into getting a new website up and running.  Then I learned what web developers and website-having organizations the world over already know:  The web may be really, really fast, but building a new website can be really, really slow. 

But voila!  Our new website is live.  Check it out: www.interactstory.com. And I think it's a beauty.  Special shout out to our friends at Cloversites for the great design template and MillionMunkeys for the search engine and interactive forms.  Seriously, if you want to put up a great looking website with great functionality, definitely chat up these guys.

And, I've already learned a second truism known by web developers and website-having organizations the world over:  A Good Website Is Never Done.  Already we have updates, fixes ("Hey, who put that there?") new partners to give shout outs to, new artists to welcome to our band of InterActors, and more. So, stay tuned for updates, and please let us know what you think!

A Grown Up Girl in Children's Theater

Hi! I'm Bess Kaye, the Administrative (means secretary) Associate (means I have other jobs too) Artist (means I can teach theater and occasionally dabble in acting) at InterAct Story Theatre! The whole title looks rather impressive. Here, let me show you:

Bess Kaye

Administrative Associate Artist

InterAct Story Theatre

At the end of last last year, on the stage of 99 seat theater in the middle of our kitchen set, Ali Oliver-Krueger turned to me and said "Hey, how good are you at administrative stuff?" She and I were two thirds of a very adult themed three women show and we were minutes away from beginning a dress rehearsal- administrative duties were far from my mind. But I quickly evaluated my experience in word processing and record keeping (limited as it was) and I replied "Meh, not bad." "Good," she said, and left it at that as we walked off stage with dish towel props in hand.

I gave the short conversation not much thought over the rehearsal but then it occurred to me what Ali was probably referring to was administrative work at her company, InterAct Story Theatre. I knew how passionate Ali was about her work and I knew that if she was offering me the opportunity to help her bring arts and theater education to children all over Maryland (and pay me for it) that was not an opportunity I should pass up.

And so began my work with InterAct. It was modest at first, mostly writing contracts and scheduling artists at different schools, but has since grown into a full fledged leadership role with the company (due in some small part to my passion for performing and teaching, but in much larger part to Ali's patience with me when I made simple errors and her willingness to teach me when I had no clue what was going on).

I won't bore you by recounting the endless emails I've sent, directions I've generated, or contracts I've typed, except to tell you that getting through all that paperwork to ensure that we reach students with our art is a hugely gratifying experience for me. I've been known to shed a tear when I see an 8 year old truly embrace the character of the kind old witch with the magic pasta pot in "Streganona". I'm a softy, it's true.

So, welcome to my blog, an account of working inside children's theater, from behind a desk, to in a classroom, to on a stage. I welcome the comments and questions of artists, actors, and educators alike, and even those just stumbling through who've ever played make-believe as a child, because if you've ever pretended, then you're an actor too!

A blog is born!

Hi there. I'm Ali Oliver-Krueger, and I'm the General Director of InterAct Story Theatre. We're an professional touring theatre for young audiences based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  This year marks our 30th year conducting performances, workshops, artist-in-residence programs, and professional development workshops...and we're celebrating our birthday by cooking up all sorts of new projects. It's an exciting time for us, and we'd like to invite you to join us as our band of bloggers post from the road (we log many, many miles on our cars as we travel from school to school), the office (generally, anywhere we open our laptops and turn on our phones), and the rehearsal room.  Welcome!