Settling in for the ride

Week 3 down, 13 to go. After a slightly bumpy take-off, yesterday we started to settle in for what looks like a smooth and pleasant ride.

What in the heck am I talking about, you are wondering? Since you asked, I’ll tell you. The subject is the Soul Miners Children’s Theatre Company of Champaign-Urbana. A couple weeks ago I described how it started but not much about what it is. Sort of left it as a “to be continued,” because that’s how I felt, like I had just stepped onto a new road and didn’t know where it was taking me.

Kind of like life, huh?

OK, OK, enough glib profundity, let’s get on with the story.

Soul Miners joins a virtues class to theatre arts classes in order to create a spiritually oriented theatrical production company. An account of today’s session should help shape that definition into a more concrete picture.

Heidi and I arrived at the Bahá'í Center in Urbana around noon yesterday (Saturday) to prepare the space for the children who would be coming soon. At a little after 1:00 p.m., the virtues class began. First the students listened to a story and then consulted to figure out the virtue that would be the subject of the class. (Today’s virtue was “determination,” one of the 13 virtues that are expressed in the story we will be presenting on stage. There are probably more than that, but we stopped at 13 because we have 13 weekly virtues classes in our schedule.) During the rest of the class the children studied a couple of quotations about determination, then pasted copies into their books. Each student has a big photo album that they will take home when the term ends, albums filled with pictures they drew and quotations from both eastern and western religious texts and from other inspirational sources. They also played a game, talked, and generally kept busy learning about determination through a variety of activities.

Yesterday’s class was taught by two of the parents. Parent and non-parent volunteers are the scheduled teachers for the next 10 weeks, with as much overlap as possible to preserve consistency for the students.

At about 2:00 p.m. the kids separated into two groups by age, to work with our theatre arts teachers, Katie and Sarah, enthusiastic young women with experience and training in both theatre and working with children. For a necessarily small stipend they have taken on a big job – melding 10 children into a skilled performance troupe. Their charges, ranging from 6-10 years old, are a diverse group of girls and boys from different racial and ethnic categories, from different schools and home schooling, with different religious backgrounds. Some were well acquainted before Soul Miners started, some never met before.

In the workroom formatting a parent contact list, I heard lots of laughter and movement. Curious, I poked my head into the closest class and saw 6 children, a teacher and a parent volunteer sitting in a circle playing “telephone,” with the emphasis on learning how to speak clearly and distinctly for audiences.

After the first hour of theatre arts class, it was snack time. Complements of still more volunteers, the children replenished their energy with apples and applesauce, nuts and peanut butter, raisins and carrots and hummus and home-baked gluten-free cookies. It was an amazingly orderly snack break, because in order to eat the kids had to sit quietly and wait to be served. Heidi’s idea. Impressive!

Then it was time to jump up and get moving again, as the younger and older age groups switched teachers to continue theatre arts training for another hour, followed by the last activity, a 20-minute appreciation session. Sitting in a circle of chairs in a room that was set up with dim lighting and soft background music, children and teachers and parents related what they had liked about the day and expressed gratitude for specific acts of service or helpfulness or public struggles to overcome personal challenges.

By now it was almost 5:00 p.m., the end of a long afternoon, but no one seemed in any hurry to leave. The playroom filled up with kids dealing Uno cards and creating dollhouse families, a small group of parents and teachers discussed how to handle one child’s needs in ways that would help both him and his classmates, one parent wrote a check for tuition while getting a full report from her daughter about the day’s activities, and another student read and signed his commitment statement.

Yep, you read that correctly. We are asking all the children to make a promise in writing to the theatre company and to themselves. In the statement that they sign, they commit to their best efforts at working with others cooperatively and lovingly, to pay attention, to show up every week and participate in performances, and also to acknowledge that they are making a commitment for which they are personally responsible.

There are a couple of reasons for these statements. One is simply that we need a consistent group in order to mount a theatrical production. But beyond that, Heidi and I have strong anecdotal evidence of the value of a child’s personal commitment. (I can tell you my recollections of this story because she published hers recently in her own blog.)

When Heidi was in eighth grade in Evanston, IL, her teachers recommended her for a local program called Earn and Learn, which tied school performance (defined by whatever each student needed for academic or social or behavioral improvement) to the opportunity to meet at an after-school worksite and earn money by doing work for local businesses. Students and parents were invited to an informational meeting, and at the end of the meeting, kids who wanted to be in the program were required to sign a personal commitment statement, and parents were asked to help their children honor that commitment.

Our daughter loved the first Earn and Learn event, a camping trip, but after one day on the job she hated the whole thing and vowed never to return. “Vowed” meaning hollered. She was absolutely, positively, in no way whatsoever going back, and that was that! Except she had signed that piece of paper and we had agreed to it, so the next day we literally high-jacked her after school and drove her to the work site, despite blood curdling screams and kicking of dashboard and threats of mayhem. Seeing she had no choice by the time we arrived, Heidi scowled and growled out of the car and into the work site. I don’t know what Rick, the guy in charge, said or did, but within a few minutes she was laughing and ready to roll. That year in Earn and Learn was one of her best experiences and a major contributor to the person she is today. Without her commitment statement, it wouldn’t have happened. And without the Earn and Learn experience, our Soul Miners venture probably would not be happening, either.

Because although the initial idea for this theatre venture was mine and we worked together for several months on the investigation and learning and planning phases, now that we are in operation as an actual school, Heidi is the lynchpin. She’s planning the virtues classes and scheduling volunteers and overseeing the afternoon’s rotation, attending to myriad details that I wouldn’t know how to handle or even know were needed. So Heidi, this is my very public statement of appreciation. Please ignore me when I get grumpy or impatient and know how thankful I am for your spirit and enthusiasm and skill.

So … back to the present. Week 3 down, 13 to go. As we progress through the term the theatre arts classes will increasingly become rehearsals for our first production, a musical adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s Horton the Elephant story, provided by the New York Children’s Theatre Company. The various parts and pieces of each Saturday’s activity will be tied together by the virtues exemplified in the tale of an elephant keeping a most un-elephant-like promise because “an elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.” (That was last week’s virtue, faithfulness.)

Week 14 will be devoted to final rehearsals, with maybe a week 14-1/2 rehearsal thrown in for good measure if needed. Weeks 15 and 16 will be performance weekends, two shows each. Then a closing celebration, and a metaphorical long nap for you-know-who before we continue our planning for the next term.

Soul Miners is not a business – tuition and ticket revenue will be used only to pay theatre arts teachers, rent performance spaces, buy supplies and cover other necessary expenses – but it is a very serious venture that we hope will be as successful as the original, award-winning New York group. Even half as successful would be fantastic! After all, we have a modest agenda: providing spiritual education, promoting religious unity as well as just about any other unity you can name, developing talent, producing great shows with both substance and style. That’s all.

Week 3 down. 13 – and many more – to go.

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