Remembering Why We Do This.
Back out on the road now with Wired, second leg of the tour, Atlantic Canada version. We flew into Winnipeg on the 16th and remain here until the 27th, so the road portion of the trip hasn’t started yet.
Allow me to speak candidly as a performer of TYA for a second.
Often, in this business, you get into a nose to the grindstone kind of mindset. Our time in each town we’re in, our time driving from province to province, state to state, our construction and tear down of the set, our checking into hotels and checking out of hotels, our lunch-time-fast-food tours, our sit down dinners simply so we can sit down, our emails, and show reports, and comings and goings take up so much of our brain power that it’s easy to forget what we’re actually out here to do.
We’re in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I’ve never been here before. The people at the Manitoba Theatre For Young People are incredibly nice. They’ve made us feel as if we’re a part of their season rather than just a show on its way through. We don’t get to feel that way very often. We’re here for ten days. Ten WHOLE days. This is the longest stop in any one place I’ve ever experienced on a TYA tour.
This time in Winnipeg, coupled with the higher than normal media calls we’ve taken part-in here, have given us the opportunity to see the fruit of our work. This time in Winnipeg has given us the chance to switch our minds from thinking about where we’re sleeping and how we’re getting there to what we’re doing, and more importantly, why we’re doing it.
Yesterday at the media call, aside from the usual interviewers, camera men, and us, there was a young girl taking part. She was in grade six and she had seen our show that afternoon. She was talking to the reporters about an incident of bullying that she experienced. Our media liaison through the theatre had asked us to come out and meet her. I assumed that she had been a victim of bullying. Once I sat down and heard her talk to the interviewer, I realized it was much more complicated than that. It always is. It turned out that, as well as feeling bullied, she had had an experience where she was a bully herself. Along with a friend, she had made a video about a fellow student and attempted to put it up online. Lucky for everyone, her parents caught her and the video was deleted before it could “go live.”
In talking to her after her interview, I realized that our show had actually impacted her. That she got it. I guess I’ve always superficially realized this about our show, that it had the power to affect these kids lives, but it gets so easy to go through the motions that you forget to look down into their eyes after the show is done.
Often in TYA we look at our performances and scripts through our own eyes. As adults, we realize what the shows are saying and we agree with their purpose. We use words like “timely” and “necessary.” The storytelling isn’t for us though. We often, behind closed doors, might also use words like, at best, “simple” and, at worst, “lame.” We forget that these plays are not written primarily for us. These plays are written for students; young people whose faculties for understanding and perceptions of abstract concepts like metaphor and allegory are still in the formative stages. When you’re zipping around in a van, interacting with students only on a mass level, you can forget, in speaking to fellow adult interviewers, about one of the most important words in describing this show: “powerful.” The storytelling hits home not because it is complex or rich in our definitions of those words but because it’s real. We deal in situations that these kids can relate with. We tell the stories of their lives and their times, not our own. And what could be more timely, necessary, and powerful than that?
Also, it’s really really cold in Winnipeg but their sunsets can easily be confused for house fires.
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