Children as Artists: The School Play Project

My elementary school did not have a theatre program. This was probably typical.

I consulted Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (as I always do) to remind myself of the pertinent headlines when I was a kid:

Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?

I played the watchmaker in my first-grade play, in 1964. I am not sure how that play came about, and it probably was no more than 10 minutes long. And that was all I did. No one made it their business to interest any of us in drama until I was twelve. My seventh-grade English teacher, Bette Neroda, was a theatre person and she was passionate about it. Not only did she instill her own incredible excitement about theatre in us, but she brought her professional actor friends in to perform for us and talk to us about their work. But that was in middle school and Miss Neroda was an exception. There was no middle school theatre program. Same with elementary school. You had to wait until high school for there to be any school-organized theatre at all.

Cut to a small town in Maine in 2021:

“It’s about making theatre with young people which puts the children in the center as the artists.”

That is at the heart of the School Play Project, an elementary school research practice which is the creation of Dana Legawiec. Dana is a theatre artist, teaching artist and arts educator. She is also a mask and movement expert, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, and, at the extreme bottom of her long list of accomplishments, she is married to me.

Perhaps below the bottom.

Dana founded the School Play Project at the Bowdoinham Community School, (a small public elementary school) in Maine in 2015. The ages of the kids are grades K-5.

Dana Legawiec working with student actors, 2021 / Photo by Rebecca Conley

“The project elevates the kid’s voices and celebrates their creativity,” she said. “It is based on the belief that all children should have the opportunity to make a piece of theater together as part of their elementary school experience.” In addition, she said, “The project is student-centered and student-led.”

OK, student-centered and student-led. But what does that mean? What does it look like in action?

“Well, first of all,” Dana said, “the project is non-competitive and inclusive, and any kid who wants to be involved is involved. So it has grown to a cast of 80-plus kids in a school whose total population is 175. The kids who want to perform have an opportunity to do that; and not only that, but the process is such that they essentially cast themselves.”

Costume sketches / Photo by Dana Legawiec

The kids always have paper and markers at every rehearsal, not only because Dana believes that it’s a great way of engaging kids who are not up on their feet, but they’re thinking as designers and they’re problem solving.

Dana is always saying to the kids, “Draw it. Show me. What is your costume going to look like? What is the set going to look like?” She goes on: “However they’re connecting to the story is how they’re going to connect to the process. It’s all connected, and they’re each making contributions from their own point of view about what’s important.”

This year they performed a site-specific, kid-generated play in the midst of Covid, called The Great Hunker Down. I asked her about their journey with this project.

“In the fall of 2020, I didn’t want to pretend that we weren’t still processing and in the midst of this experience – the global pandemic, being in quarantine, and being a child. And everything that that meant to them, and how they were processing it. But I just wanted to ask the kids, ‘All right we are going to do a play, what do you think we should do?’ And right off the bat the kids said we need to do a play about this.”

So they started rehearsals on Google Meets.

“And in our virtual rehearsals, when I would let the kids talk about whatever they wanted to, overwhelmingly kids were talk about their pets and animals. Clearly these animals were going to become characters in the story.”

“As a group, we would have conversations about ‘this is the story we’re going to tell’ - what’s important about the story? What are we interested in? What are we curious about? What are the challenges?”

The animals became the metaphor for the kids living though the pandemic.

Dana with her cast / Photo by Sarah Gagnon

“The kids were doing their own little smalling writing groups, so I would come in two or three days later and there would be a 10-page scene. And we’re talking second, third and fourth graders. They would just run with it.”

I asked, “The school district was good with you rehearsing a play?”

“All of this time we were navigating the school rules, which were pretty stringent and kept changing. So by the time we started to meet outside, it was like starting over because the venue had changed.”

The play was to take place outside on the grounds of the school – blacktop, playground and fields – as well as a beautiful, wooded, nature preserve which abutted the school property. Kid actors would set themselves up in various locations and the audience would be led from one place to the next to watch each scene, sometimes traveling deep into the woods.

It was delightful to see these animals and magical creatures pop up frequently out of nowhere – being cute (as all kids in animal costumes are), but also being fully engaged in the scenes they were playing. It was also moving to know that the kids were performing about something that mattered to them. This was a story that they needed to tell.

Audience and performers / Photo by Dana Legawiec

Incidents of the power of art to change everyone involved have become commonplace for Dana.

“The first year I did this, I remember one child who didn’t seem to be very into it – didn’t appear to be having fun, or connecting with other kids. I thought for sure that one day that kid would stop showing up. But they kept coming to rehearsals. The day of the show – the kid missed cues, and was literally like in the lobby eating snacks instead being onstage, and I thought “this is a disaster.” The child’s mom rushed up to me after the show, tears in her eyes, saying she couldn’t believe the transformation – she’d said her child was really shy and withdrawn, barely talks even at home, and it was amazing to see them up there, participating and singing and doing all of the things with everyone else. It shifted my perspective on all of it. You just can’t predict how a child’s participation is going to be transformative, both for the child and for the family.”

This year there was something equally emblematic.

“The kids formed their own writing groups for The Great Hunker Down and it was a mirror of their social relationships. They would kind of connect with their friends around a scenario. But there was a second grader who was very engaged in the process but didn’t fit into the other groups. So at some point she just took it upon herself to write her own scene with multiple characters. And when she read her scene to the group, suddenly the kids were flocking to be in her scene. There wasn’t a natural place for her, so she wrote her own story. I think that’s a really great metaphor for how to succeed in life. If you’re not fitting into somebody else’s story, you can write your own.”

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