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.