Why do you drink?

Why do you drink? This week we explored our characters’ potential motives for going to a party, which is something I don’t think many people, including the students participating in this project, have thought about before. At first, the discussion was very cursory - “to have fun”, “to see my friends” and other similar reasons, which are true, but our motivations for doing anything are always more complex than that. In order to encourage the students to think deeper, Gary employed a “classic Gary” technique - he repeats “Why?” over and over and over again with the only rule being you cannot respond with “I don’t know”. What’s distinctive to his approach is he always asks it under the veil of “for your character”, not for yourself, and though the initial answers may have been fictional, by the end all of the students were giving examples from their life that revealed sincere insecurities. It was difficult to explain for a lot of youth, but considering the youth’s responses, I think we’ve created a safe space. 

Gary, myself and one of our guests (this week we had a guest service provider who’s interested in being involved, Megan Faye) were moved by the youth’s honesty – at some points we almost cried- and this shocked the youth- why would we cry? Especially if we kept telling them high school is the worst time and it gets better afterwards and that we identify with them. For me, I feel as though at some point in my life I crossed this imaginary line into a “more adult world” where we’re not always honest with each other or at least we don’t share as much personal information. Since I’ve crossed this line, whenever someone is boldly honest, it just moves me. Based solely on the fact that this experience is giving the youth a means to reflect on themselves, I think it’s been a success. And based on the response that Gary, Megan Faye and I had, I think everyone could benefit from having a space to reflect. 

Anyway, I won’t reveal here what the youth shared because that would not only violate the trust we’ve developed, it will also take away from the artistic representation of the piece.

Getting into it

Just when I thought we had a rhythm going, Gary shook things up again this week. For the majority of the practice we focused only on our “fictional” identities as part of a scene about overdose. I think all of us could feel the gears shift as we went from short, entertaining activities to focusing on one scene for an hour and a half. It was a bit of an adjustment and it required a lot of encouragement and goading on Gary’s behalf and letting go of fears and self judgments for the youth. 

For the last 15 minutes we debriefed and honed in on what was going well for all of us and what wasn’t working. It was during this time that the youth let their leadership, emotions and ideas flow. One youth shared that the story his character told was based on a loss he experienced years ago. Another youth gave brilliant directing instructions that transformed the quiet expressions of one youth to those filled with anger and begrudging love. During this time the youth also emphasized that they wanted this performance to be “real”, to reflect actual experiences of young people and not an extreme version (either glorifying or displaying the worst possible scenario) of drug use. From these reflections I think the deeper goals of this theatre project - to create a space for youth to reflect and give meaning to their experiences - is occurring.  I know for me what feels like the next step is to define a “lesson learned” from the experience but I’m not sure that is something that will explicitly come from this performance. The youth specifically identified “stories with a moral at the end” as something they did not want to do; they want to create something for people to interpret. I’m excited to see how this will turn out. 

As a side note, some of the youth have been advocating for a space to show case their other artistic skills and as a result a dance number has been introduced! 

The abstract is moving more and more towards the tangible as we start to brainstorm scenes and settings, firm up bookings for the locations and prepare posters. I can feel the momentum building!

Third week photo

It began with a bench...