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Stories

Stories From the Workshops

By Adam Weiner

Show and Tell

I spend lots of time building the group into an ensemble and one person holding back can throw off the whole dynamics of the group. During one of the sessions, a girl was not participating.  I asked her what the problem was and I received a mumbled response.  

The group started to fidget.  I started an exercise and the group kept looking over to the girl.  I got everyone to sit down in a circle.  

I explained that we needed to get through this in order to get some work done.  She slowly lifted the back of her shirt.  There was a bruise about the size of a baseball.  "My step-dad." she said softly.

Another girl in the group said "Look at this," she rolled up her sleeve revealing a scar, "Cigarette burn."

The first girl rolled up her sleeve,  "Scissor."

For the next five minutes they rolled up their sleeves and pant legs, showed scars on their backs and bellies.  It reminded me of that scene from Jaws, where Richard Dryfuss and Robert Shaw talked about run ins with sharks.  Except these girls did not venture out into the deep.  

They were abused by their parents.  Life shouldn't be like this.  And we wonder why these kids are at-risk.  For the performance, I had these girls direct two other girls in the scene.  

This distancing gave the abused girls an opportunity to look at their lives objectively.  The audience was stunned, not only at what they saw but that these kids were being so honest and open about their experiences.  No one left the performance that night unchanged.

 

In The Schools

One day while working with these kids, I was doing an exercise entitled Slow Motion Samurai. Basically this game is about killing everyone else in slow motion.  Your hands are the weapons and if you touch someone they die in a horrible slow motion manner.  This is a lot of fun, just as much fun to die as to win.  So I was doing this exercise when in walks a district administrator from the State Department of Education.  Her mouth dropped wide open.  "How could you do this with these kids?" she probably thought to herself.  

But within ten minutes of ending the game, we were discussing the violence in their lives in a very meaningful way.  By the end of the session we had created several scenes that could take your breath away on that subject.

Once again her mouth dropped open.  In a normal classroom discussion, it would have been very difficult to get this kind of stuff out of the kids.

Puck’s Theatre

329 Laurel Oak Street

Hartsville, SC 29550

843-230-3273

adamw@pivotalstage.com