Johnny Saldana visits CCNY! by Erin Jean Jewell
The
City College Educational Theatre club had the honor of hosting our winter
workshop with the master of Ethnodrama, Johnny Saldaña. January 21 turned out
to be a snowy morning, but even Johnny, who is accustomed to the sunny weather
at Arizona State University was in good spirits. The morning snow put a delay
on our events, but once we got started, we hit the ground running! First, Jonny
shared different forms of Ethnodrama with us...books, plays and performances.
As a group we learned exactly what an Ethnodrama is and they myriad of ways it
can be used to produce theatre. After creating a better idea about the
different forms Ethnodrama can take, we dove in and learned how to create
Ethnodrama for both ourselves and with our students. We began by simply sharing
what we discussed with our peers over breakfast. Such a simple task that
students could easily perform, right? We talked about winter break and places
that we traveled to, people who had started dating someone new, YouTube videos
that were taking the internet by storm and even about the NFL playoffs. I would
imagine our conversations weren’t all that different than those of high school
students! After sharing out our
conversations with partners we chose one conversation to focus on and create a
small piece around. Johnny gave us room to be creative but each small scene was
to be about 30 seconds each. Once we had rehearsed, these short scenes were
combined with our peers in a large circle and created a small scale Ethnodrama
production of our "breakfast conversation." The results were incredible. Our morning
conversation was used to create a piece about today’s hot topics. We saw that
we could easily transition this work into interests of our students and then
create small, meaningful performance pieces devised and performed by our
students.
After
lunch Johnny gave us a sheet of prompts that he would give to his students
which included phrases such as - "Who was your first love,"
"Discuss a challenging moment of your life," or "Discuss a funny
or embarking moment that has happen to you." We were first given time to
flesh out our ideas and write down key moments of this event in our lives. Then
we were asked to share with different partners. I chose my first love; a boy
from my hometown who I had a crush on for many years. After each sharing Johnny
would ask us to notice or comment on different details that needed to be
included. With every sharing we would get more comfortable, our writing would
get stronger and our delivery would grow to more of a performance. What started
out as writing our story ended up becoming self monologues or - Ethnodrama
pieces. In the end we shared out in small groups. Our stories ranged from embarrassing
moments, to stories about our families and moments of triumphs in our lives. In
such a short time I wrote and performed a piece that I was proud of. I shared
something about my life, my first love and the memories that came rushing back
with that.
I could not believe that we came up with 2
performance pieces during our short workshop. Yes, these ideas would have to be
scaffold for students, but everyone left with amazing ideas as to how we could
get our students to create original pieces and use those pieces to create a
performance. The power of Ethnodrama is amazing. Taking real stories, personal
accounts or interviews and turning them into a theatrical production is an
amazing way to share research and use the power of theatre in a strong,
productive and engaging way. The day was incredibly rewarding. As a group of
graduate candidates we were able to explore a new type of drama that would
engage our students and allow them to create productions from topics that are
on their mind daily. In the end, the snowy day left us excited about theatre
education and prepared to share Johnny Saldaña's Ethnodrama work with our
students.
For pictures click here https://picasaweb.google.com/117111343359289314785/JohnnySaldana
