Summer Session I - "Theatre literally became the only language I had."

Welcome to the first edition of Purple Crayon Player's Summer Session!  Just because school is out doesn't mean the Players' passion for TYA has come to a halt.  Join us with updates on our members' adventures all over the world as they spread the love of theatre to young audiences of all kinds.  

First up, take a trip with Abby Schwarz, our Literary Manager, to Thailand where she arrived as a performer and educator, and left having learned just as much as she taught.

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I have spent a good portion of my time at Northwestern planning, creating, and dreaming up theatre for young audiences (TYA) for our university and the surrounding community with Purple Crayon.  This summer, I did pretty much the same thing but under very different circumstances - with a community based theatre company in the lush green countryside of Northern Thailand.  I lived and worked with a group of international and Thai students for three weeks, learning about traditional Thai performance and about Thai culture of the past and present.  I learned so much from this experience:  about theatre, about Thailand, about life.

I found myself thinking about Purple Crayon a lot while I was there, as the majority of the work we did in the community was with and for youth.  Working and playing with young people was an unbeatable way to learn about where I was.  Every person I met and every experience I had in Thailand was enriching and life-altering in some way.  But the interactions I had with youth as a facilitator, as an actor, and as a friend were the ones that I believe wills tay with me the longest and affect me the most.

For me, working with youth is always an unpredictable and eye-opening challenge.  But I faced a challenge in Thailand that I had never aced with Purple Crayon or anywhere else:  the challenge of working and performing across linguistic and cultural barriers.  And huge ones at that.  But from the elementary school where we performed children's books to the concrete pavilion where we performed a show our ensemble had written and staged, I communicated with the amazing young people I met through song, dance, and play.  We could not pronounce each others' names or have anything resembling a "conversation," but after the exchange of workshops and performances, we were humming the same songs and sharing laughs over the same experiences.  Theatre literally became the only language I had.

It is the official opinion of Purple Crayon that young people are brilliant.  No matter how many lesson plans we write or educational shows we produce, they will teach us just as much (and oftentimes, it seems, even more).  In Thailand, this rang truer than ever before.  This was due in part to the design of the program I was in.  When we stayed in a remote hill-tribe community, doing workshops with and performances for local youth, they were given space to lead workshops and present performances for us, too.  While we taught mask performance and physical theatre, they (with the help of some of community adults) taught us traditional dances and songs.  While we performed skits with puppets, clowning and the Thai art forms we had been learning, they performed sword dances and beautiful folk songs.

Just as Purple Crayon has an annual touring show which we bring to schools in and around Evanston, on this program we created a show to go on a kind of mini-tour around the area.  The show was an entertaining and heartfelt story about an ant who goes to a bug-school and it not accepted by the other insects there.  The ant falls ill and the other insects decide to help her.  They embark on a perilous journey to get the ant help on the sun.  We focused on Western performance forms that transcend language barriers (like dance, puppetry, and acrobatics), combined with Thai theatre skills and language that avoided these barriers altogether.

As I recover from the most intense case of jet lag, I am meditating on all of these memories, and letting this incredible experience soak in.  I am so excited to jump into our 2010-2011 season and see how my experiences in Thailand will fuse with my work for Purple Crayon!

--Abby S.