Encore! Encore!

Encore! Encore!

Sobha Kavanakudiyil

A few days ago The Graduate Program in Educational Theatre posted its final blog for the semester written by our very own Meredith Smart! We ended on a fantastic note with a spectacular evening of sharing our artistry, celebrating the end of the semester, and toasting in the holiday season. 

 

But this deserves an encore performance!

 Jennifer Katona, Program Director of the Graduate Program in Educational Theatre at The City College of New York teaches a course called the Fundamentals of Teaching Theatre. This year graduate students directed middle school students at PS 161 in “The Little Mermaid.”

Our relationship with PS 161 has been developing for years and this Fall the production of “The Little Mermaid” was spectacular!

 

The performance had fantastic energy from both graduate students and PS 161 middle school students.  In addition, graduate students from this course also had a communications group and they focused on promoting the event (working along side graduate student Lauren Adler) and creating a community potluck.  Success! 

We were thrilled to have MTI’s Peter Filichia attend one of the three performances and he wrote:

When parents come to the school where their child is enrolled, they’re usually prepared to hear bad news….Jennifer Katona, the director of the graduate program in educational theater at The City College of New York, didn’t want that to be the scenario at nearby P.S. 161. “I preferred to have parents come to the school not because their kids were in trouble,” she says, “but because they were now in a show.”

So three years ago, Katona and P.S. 161 principal Pamela Price forged a relationship. City College’s graduate-student directors would stage musicals with sixth, seventh and eighth graders. The results were 35-minute TYA/Kids’ versions of PINOCCHIO (2011), THE JUNGLE BOOK (2012 ) and ALADDIN (2013). They went so well that Katona felt emboldened to make her 2014 entry the hour-long THE LITTLE MERMAID, JR. “And,” she says, “we’re doing scene and costume changes, which we’ve never attempted before.”   Read more of the MTI blog

Truly a spectacular encore to celebrate! So proud to be part of the CCNY Ed Theatre Ensemble! Happy Holidays!

End of the Semester Cabaret

End of the Semester Cabaret

Meredith Smart

In Artistic Lab, Drama in Education students tackle the same conundrum teaching artists and theatre teachers constantly struggle with throughout their careers: process versus product.  We came into class expecting to practice our artistry, have fun, breathe and oh yeah, there’s also a show.  And so, we embarked on the process that got us to Thursday night. 

This fall, we were the highlight, mostly first year graduate students just getting our feet wet in this new and exciting environment.  We broke into artistry groups and I gravitated towards the directing group with Jeff Seabaugh and Lisanne Shaffer.  I have done it all over the years in one form or another, but these days I’m really seeing directing as my artistry.  At some point in the creation of the framework for the semester, it was decided that the directing group would go last, and actually have a hand at directing the show with our fearless leader Sobha Kavanakudiyil. 

And so I participated in the beautiful and joyful process of a handful of weeks where my cohorts took turns leading workshops, purely for the experience of it, but always at the back of my mind I was thinking, “how is this going to translate to the Cabaret?”  After the workshops, we would discuss what had inspired us and how we thought we could use the material in the show, and there was always something, many things actually, that had those possibilities.  And then the following week the next group would go and a whole new world of possibilities would open up, and I’d wonder how we could reconcile clowning with musical theatre and fight choreography skits featuring Drama in Ed concepts like process drama and arts standards. 

As we approached “Directing Week” how this amazing process was going to become a product was still a mystery to me.  And yet, something started to take shape.  The first step in sparking the theme of our cabaret was the decision to begin with a bazaar of clowning with a Pippin-esque vibe.  The first huge step in the creating a cohesive and engaging show was asking Jim Kroener and Lauren Adler to be our ring leaders.  After that, everything fell into place. 

Of course, there were struggles.  Only having one hour a week dedicated to this project put some serious constraints on what we could accomplish.  But we grad students fought back against those constraints, making outside rehearsals happen, writing and directing scenes on the side, and sometimes on the fly, and with our sheer will, with Sobha at the helm, we made something lovely.  It was entertaining, it was fun, and I think it highlighted the creativity we cultivated throughout the process. 

The Little Mermaid at P.S. 161

The Little Mermaid Junior at P.S. 161

Christopher Smalley

            There we were. It was one day before the opening of “The Little Mermaid Junior” at P.S. 161 and things were looking grim. Lines were being flubbed, entrances were being missed, and costumes were being tossed haphazardly around backstage. This was the first year that the Fundamentals of Teaching Theatre class had attempted anything of this breadth…and it was starting to look like it was going to be the last. 

            And then it happened. The magic happened. That indescribable magic, the kind of magic that only someone who has done theatre with young actors knows about happened. We came back the next day and a show appeared as if from nowhere. However, those of us working with the students of P.S. 161 know that it wasn’t from nowhere. The passion was there the whole time. This group, some of whom had never acted before, became an ensemble in front of our very eyes and brought the classic Disney musical to life.

And the magic didn’t end with the students onstage. Last year the cast of less than twenty performed to an audience of less than forty. This year, a cast of over thirty-five performed to a sold out house of over four hundred people. Four hundred!! A community potluck dinner that was scheduled before the show transformed from a first time question mark where raisins were the only item on the menu to an honest to goodness community event. The food and drink flowed. Families from every corner of Harlem came together over good-natured discussions of whose flan was better. The energy was infectious and carried through to the final performance.

At the end of the night, as this ensemble came together for the last time, it was the profound reflections of the students that showed just how magical the experience had been. I’ve always believed that to witness theatre through the eyes of student actors is to witness it at it’s most pure. These few, these happy few, who had braved long rehearsals, brand-new directors, changed (and re-changed) choreography, and the cheers (and jeers) of their peers, came together and spoke with such maturity of their experience that it floored us graduate students.

I can say for myself that the time I spent as a mentor, (or buddy, or grad, or “tall guy”) will remain on of the best experiences I have ever had. Looking around the circle yesterday, as we grads came together one final time to wrap the class, I knew that it was a near universal truth that these students had effected us as much as we hopefully effected them. Now I have to wait 365 days to go back and watch how they top themselves next year. 

Cecily O'Neill Visits!

Cecily O'Neill Visits

Giselle D'Souza

Cecily O’Neill began her recent process drama workshop at CCNY Ed Theatre by posing this question: “Are there any difficulties you’ve encountered in your work?” As I reflected on this enormous question, I didn’t even know where to start. One fellow student shared his challenges of working with kids who simply did not want to work.   

 

As a freelance teaching artist since 2008, who recently began working as a full time theatre teacher at a charter school in Harlem, I have encountered similar challenges. A majority of my teaching artist work in the past has been with students who had a passion for theatre, bright eyed and bushy tailed kids who joined programs of their own accord and thrived on almost anything I threw at them. In my current position, all students are required to take theatre. I am honored to say that most of my students dive right in, but there are always those moments when they are just not interested in theatre. Sometimes I think of process drama as a technique that can magically lure students into dramatic work, without them even realizing it. The magic of Process Drama is to build so much belief with your students that they begin to drive the work on their own accord. 

The main focus of the workshop was a lesson about southern plantations from Ms. O’Neill’s book Dreamseekers.  We began by imagining we were employees at “Heritage USA”, a company that owns many historical properties around America. Ms. O’Neill posed as a visitor from the UK division of the company, asking us how we go about acquiring properties and setting them up for public viewing. After some discussion, we focused on a specific southern plantation that Heritage USA had the desire to acquire. We had heard that the owner of this plantation was going to be quite difficult to persuade and it would take a lot of work. “Are you up for it?” She asked, in true process drama fashion…and of course we agreed. Next, Ms. O’Neill broke us up into groups of three and asked one student to take on the role of an elderly plantation owner. First she had the plantation owners stand up in the center and imagine they were looking out onto their plantation, pondering the possibility of it being sold. She asked us to comment on what we saw in the physiicalities and facial expressions of the plantation owners. The other two students in each group played employees at Heritage USA; set out to convince the owner to sell their property to the company.  In my group, I was assigned the role of employee, which was quite challenging. My fellow employee and I worked so well together, that when time was up I found myself so invested in my mission that I did not want to stop!

The beauty of Ms. O’Neil’s work is that she herself is learning along with her students. Sticking to a stringent plan or schedule didn’t seem to be her style; instead she allowed the workshop to evolve as we went along. Next she tried something she had never done before, having the employees stand behind the plantation owner and say words to represent what they had experienced in their meeting with the plantation owner. Each group got a turn to share and we discussed the similarities and differences between the plantation owners. Next, she asked the plantation owners to stand in a line and asked them “What is your biggest concern?” having them answer in short phrases. This was followed by three different texts handed out to each student, asking us to choose a phrase or two that stood out to us. The source material shifted the focus to the slaves and how they lived on the plantations, which was a sharp turn into the focus of the lesson. As time ran out, Cecily mentioned a number of other exercises she might use with this lesson and closed the workshop with telling us to thing about these questions: “What are the kids bringing to it? How can you give them, not what they want, but what they need?”

As I reflect on what my students “need” in a theatre class in charter school in Harlem, I realize that they simply need a place to be heard, a place where they are important and their voice matters. In my classroom, I strive every day to build positive self-esteem and creative expression and I look forward to using Process Drama techniques to support my mission.