Six Girls and Six Chairs
When I was a kid, doing theater meant putting on a musical. A big ol' flashy musical. For a long time, that is all I knew theater to be: singing, dancing and acting out lines from a script. Even when I took classes as a kid, I always thought they were a means to an end. They were there to teach me skills I needed for my performances as Little Red Riding Hood, Demeter in Cats or random chorus girl number six. Musical number or bust.
In graduate school, we thought on a smaller scale. There was very little conversation about putting up the flashy musical or how to stage a perfect opening number. Graduate school, in a teeny tiny nutshell, was about teaching students how to be more well rounded humans and using theater to do it. My teaching practice is a perfect mix of what made me fall in love with theater and graduate school. However, there are still some theatre practices that I don't quite understand. And when I don't understand something, I avoid it. Naturally. In my classes, I RUN... FLEE.... HIDE from devising theater. (dun dun dun). Devising theater means creating theater with a plot or without a plot, from interviews, newspaper articles, songs, moment work, movement work, improv, anything really. It has no structure. No plan. It is a type A personality nightmare.
One of my classes is made up of six charismatic, communicative, supportive and diverse group of ferocious females. They are brilliant young high schoolers who make the hour I see them the best part of every day. Right after Christmas break we read the Laramie Project (a devised theater piece!) and then I was going to take them through different devising techniques. I planned for this to be three days ... tops. We would do a little newspaper work, a little moment work, bada-bing, bada-boom. We finished reading the play on January 18th. It's almost March... we are still devising.
The students have been working on a half hour long piece of devised verbatim theater, meaning that everything they say was verbatim from an series of interviews they did with with 14 different people. They are walking in the shoes of others, playing people with different outlooks and perspectives. They tell the stories in complex and robust ways. They theatricalize moments using movement that hits home in a way that words just can't. One that stands out is a piece about a little girl of color and her beloved white doll and the day she realized that they are different colors. That one was a tear jerker in the simplest, purest way. No bright lights. Just six girls and six chairs.
So how did my three day sampler platter of devising turn in to a seven week long, fully thought out play? Well, this group of girls from incredibly diverse backgrounds, with all different experiences, in a predominately white environment, needed to be uncomfortable. Rather, they asked to be uncomfortable. They had a lot to say that couldn't be said anywhere else. They needed the permission to ask hard questions, to think more deeply and to hear how race has affected the experience of others. They needed the space to put movement and creative storytelling to the things they were hearing and feeling. Not to write an essay or have a round table discussion, but to adjust their bodies in a way that also told the story. They have combined a difficult conversation with a level of empathy only theater can give. It's a moment in time where they are free to feel, be uncomfortable, trust each and use all that mess that to create something important yet taboo. It's the time to have hard conversations on their own terms. In theatrical terms. To share with their little world. Apparently, they needed this.
It's not big and flashy. It's not what I planned. It's better. It's theirs.
