Artsy Funsy

Yet another day in the books. Can you believe that this mini-tour has only two more performance days left?!

Today we went back to one of my personal favorites, a magnate school for the arts. The kids there are great. If you remember from a few weeks ago, I mentioned a place where they had a nice stage, with all the accouterments...and a fully equipped T.V studio right next to it. It's pretty neat. They really get it when it comes to being involved with a live performance event.

We had very enthusiastic audiences, lots of laughs, lots of silence in the serious moments, and plenty of applause and questions afterward. We even got a free meal out of the deal (the shamrock-shaped pretzels were a really cool and tasty touch). During our Q and A, they were really impressed with one of our tricks: we make it appear that a brand new pencil gets sharpened.

For context, here's the summary of the play we do it in:
The Pencil Who's Afraid to be Sharpened. This play was actually written by an entire class. Pencil #1 one is brand new. She hops over to the stud of the group, pencil #2, and pencil #3, or "Stubby", the height-challenged vet of the pencil box, waiting in a line to get pointy by the sharpener. Pencil #1, innocently asking about this strange machine, gets the "newbie" treatment as #2 and #3 decide to playmind games with her--they tell #1 all sorts of scary things about the sharpener. However, when it comes time for #1 to get a little shaved off the top, she finds out that her courage to go through with it made her one very good looking, pain-free, pointy pencil.

So now back to the trick:
We have an arrangement to make #1's sharpened head (all the players playing pencils wear corresponding pencil hats) appear when she removes herself from the sharpener. When done right, the trick should make it look like the sharp head magically replaced the flat one. The way we do it is have the pointy hat underneath the flat one and then the sharpener (in this case me) will pull the over-hat and turn such that the audience never sees me leave with the over-hat backstage. This one can be very satisfying when a collective "WHOAAAAAAAA" catches up to me as I deposit the flat top. Ah, the little things in life...

The rest of the day was spent reading kid plays in the 3rd, 4th, and high school grades. Most are exactly crowd-pleasers, although some have an awful lot of potential...if there was time to develop them with the playwrights. Unfortunately, there's really only enough to time to pick, choose, fix some grammar/spelling, and get into the rehearsal room. Hopefully these kids will have had enough reactions to their work from schoolmates and those beyond the classroom to encourage them to keep working at their craft.

I think we often take for granted how innate the need for and ability to tell stories really is in our DNA. No, I don't think there's an allele in there somewhere or some special combination of organic acids that dictates it a specific story-telling gene...but it's a proven observation that every human culture on the planet uses storytelling in one form or another. In everyday life we see people we label as "performers", but we really could take Shakespeare's famous lines about "all the world" to see the way we in real life really are. No doubt for many of you, this isn't the most shocking revelation. But there are people out there that study all of humanity through the theories of narrative (oh yes... there are scientific studies in the field of communication exclusively utilizing this principle). For the everyday person, it's a way to make your movie-watching and theater-going experience more meaningful--where do you see your life in these stories? Where do you see life in the stories that the people around you tell; look to even the most mundane and you'll find a whole world behind that benign tale. For the artist--not just the actor--it's one more way to remind ourselves that if we are to be a mirror of life for the human world to peer into and rediscover itself (as I've heard mentioned in many places and books), we must be willing to reflect in the observations of our experiences both in and beyond the theater; it's performance and rehearsal spaces. We ourselves are constantly writing new chapters with every minute we're alive. Any moment within could be the inspiration--that moment when we see the mirror bounce something back and suddenly we understand; now, we have confidently gained a genuine interest to share a new, very personal, view with others.

And with that I say, goodnight.

-Ben

P.S.-Speaking of peaking into the mirror, I am always happy to hear your thoughts, please feel free to share!