Brattleboro Reformer
Posted: 03/30/2012
BRATTLEBORO - No kid wants to feel like roadkill.
But
that's how Daniel McMahon feels after being buried in an avalanche of
bigger, older kids, who trample him in a schoolyard touch football game,
take the ball away and call him "loser" as they leave him lying there
... like roadkill.
Fortunately, this game comes with a "Rewind"
button. As the big kids celebrate their touch football success, Celia
steps forward and stops them in their tracks with a disarming question:
"Would you want that done to you?"
Chastened, the big kids rewind the
scene, and their leader, Aja, chooses sides a little differently,
mixing big kids and little kids and picking Daniel to be his
quarterback. The scene plays forward again, this time happily ... with
no roadkill.
But life doesn't come with a "Rewind" button. Nobody
knows that better than the 14 teens and tweens who gathered on a March
afternoon to enact this little scene in a classroom at New England Youth
Theatre.
Those young people make up the "Rock Your Boat" AcTouring
Company, a program of NEYT that aims to address real-life issues kids
face, through skits, theater games and direct engagement with students.
Working
with NEYT Founder and Artistic Director Stephen Stearns, the 14 young
people appear to be having plenty of fun as they worked for more than
two weeks to create skits and scenes for student audiences. But a list
of issues on a blackboard behind them indicates the serious nature of
their work: Bullying, gay taunting, laughing at misfortune, betraying
trust, exclusion of the uncool, cyberbullying, making fun of race or
religion, spreading lies, ganging up, intimidation, bus bullying.
No
wonder Stearns had little trouble finding four high-school-age mentors
and 10 actors ages 11 to 13 from Brattleboro, Bellows Falls and Keene,
N.H., willing to do such important work.
"NEYT is a big part of my
life. Stephen Stearns is one of my first acting coaches, so I knew it
would be a lot of fun," said 11-year-old Rock Your Boat troupe member
Lexi Larsen. "It's good to help people, because in my school there's a
bunch of bullying, and it has to stop."
"Rock Your Boat" began a tour
of four elementary schools on Tuesday at Vernon Elementary School and
Wednesday at Oak Grove School in Brattleboro. The programs include 30
minutes of performance and 15 minutes for the actors to talk about
issues with the students at the school. The tour continues on April 3 at
Academy School and April 6 at Guilford Elementary School.
The burning question is will it work? The Rock Your Boat actors believe it will.
"We're not saying it in a lecturing way. We're saying it in a fun way,"said Rock the Boat trouper Maia Struthers-Friedman.
"I
think that theater can be super-influential," agreed fellow Rock the
Boater Maeve Campman. "I'm not positive this will change bullying, but
it will definitely raise awareness of it."
The early returns are
favorable. One woman in the audience in Vernon told Stearns "This is the
best thing I have ever seen brought into the school."
It made a big
impression with the fourth- through sixth-graders at Oak Grove, too.
Very telling was the first question a student asked the troupers: "Will
you be back next year?"
The Rock the Boat program represents the
latest step in NEYT's growing efforts to reach outside its walls and
beyond merely performing plays and musicals.
"I think of New England
Youth Theatre now under his moniker: 'NEYT: It's the attitude,'" said
Stearns. "I started NEYT to teach a positive mental attitude."
And to help kids make a difference.
The
genesis of Rock Your Boat grew out of efforts by a number of groups in
the community to address issues of racism, bullying and other forms of
intolerance, peer pressure, violence, healthy choices and building
empathy. In developing programs around this, Windham Southeast
Supervisory Union Superintendent Ron Stahley invited Stearns to work
with a group of middle school students who were being trained as peer
mentors. The students were invited to see NEYT's summer production of
"Grease" and over three years, Stearns led other training for students
and educators alike, many involving dramatic role playing and other
theater games. NEYT has developed other programs around themes of
restorative justice and has inspired BUHS to create an Arts for Social
Change course.
Stearns envisions the AcTour program as an ongoing
endeavor that could one day run year-round, with three different plays,
three different troupes, different directors and more.
"The troupes that go out will not only be NEYT actors. Other organizations and art forms can be involved," said Stearns.
For
now, the test pilots are the 14 Rock Your Boat troupers, who are
working on skits written by Stearns and the troupers and based on
extensive research and consultation with area educators and experts in
the field.
"In talking with (Academy School Principal) Andy Paciulli,
he said 'My students will really respond to kids who are their own age.
He also said 'Please bring in some older kids who are in high school,'"
said Stearns.
The Rock Your Boat troupe fits the bill, including
Amelia Graff, who attends Academy School and is anxious to see what her
friends and fellow students there think.
Fortunately, she has a lot of support among the Rock Your Boaters.
"I
want Amelia to come back and tell us that people at her school took it
seriously," said Rock Your Boat's Aja Selbach. "A couple of us are
older, and we're not around the schools we're performing in. We're like
the ambassadors, and we'd like the next generation to be better than
us."
Providing wind for Rock Your Boat's sails, People's United Bank stepped in as sponsor.
"We
were very impressed by the fact that it was students talking to and
performing for students," said Arne Hammarlund, community services
manager for People's United Bank in Brattleboro.
The Rock Your Boat
troupers are: Maeve Campman, Celia Cota, Cassie Dunn, Amelia Graff,
Jason Guerino, Lexi Larsen, Rye Lyczak, Elias Martel, Daniel McMahon,
Joseph Meima, Mia Rubinstein, Aja Selbach, Kaelan Selbach and Maia
Struthers-Friedman.
