Last night, I went to a play at Richmond’s Gateway Theatre called Oliver Handelschmidst’s Weird and Wonderful Circus. My 10 year old cousin-in-law was in the play, and did a wonderful job (go Quinn!). After a nerve-wracking ten minutes in which I did not know that his character was supposed to be stuttering, my husband John and I sat back and enjoyed watching 5-13 year olds dance, sing and act. I was genuinely entertained and impressed with the kids’ performance (arm-wrestling with jaguars? Lobster dances? Tired kid detectives on a kidnapping case taking a kid-nap? HST-jabs for the older folk in the audience? What’s not to love?), and it got me thinking about drama – why and how is it important to our society? What role does it play in building community?
Drama - a solid alternative for us non-sporty folk!
Of course, drama and theatre also help to foster creativity and broaden imagination (one character was a pickle in the play, folks – a pickle), improve cognitive skills like memory and attention, and teaches life-long skills like public speaking ability and improvisation. It encourages perspective-taking, which we all know is a crucial skill all individuals, communities, and world-leaders should possess in order to empathize and see from others’ point of view (how do you think North Korea would be different if Kim Jong ll had the opportunity to take a drama class?). And as evidenced by the play last night, it can capture the best of what a multicultural country like Canada should be – kids of all different ethnic backgrounds came together to sing and dance the following message to the audience: Although the children in Oliver Handelschmidst’s famous circus come from around the world and dreamed of one day having a family, they come to realize that they are, in fact, each other’s family. As one character (it may have been the Pickle, or perhaps the horn-less unicorns, or my favorite character P-Paya) astutely observes (sings), you aren’t always born with a family, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find your family in the community you wind up in.
Congrats to the kids in the Gateway Academy for the Performing Arts program for an amazing show!
Amazing post, Michelle! And amazing performance, Quinn!
Aside from all the wonderful and important creativity-building and people-meeting of acting and drama, there is an important professional story here as well. Acting 101 is, according to many career practitioners, the most important university course that students take when it comes to their career. Sure, if you want to be a Chemist or a Historian or an Engineer, math, writing and courses about not blowing yourself up in a lab help a lot, too. But ideas are nothing unless you can present them to an audience. And acting is the thing that helps the most.
My favourite part of the play was hard to pick – I loved the “I arm wrestled a Jaguar” part as well as the sideways-moving lobster-people and the manatees (seriously, manatees) and especially my rightfully stuttering cousin.
Great job Quinn!
Horn-less Unicorns? That sounds like a Johnism / Hornism taken to the level of the Jungian archetype. (c;
Insightful post, I absolutely agree. Drama projects and arts classes were the only way for me, too, to be something other than an “under-achiever” in high school. Nothing trains soft-skills for a 15-year old like playing Sarastro in Mozart’s “Flute enchantée”… (and I had really cool make-up and robes XD). Plus… I met my first girlfriend in that project! (c:
Theatre saved me in high school. It provided shelter to the strange and unusual kids attempting to navigate a mainstream popularity-centric world.