Last night I went up to Estes Park (CO) to watch my 19 year old son Evan sing in the spring musical for his high school, Eagle Rock School. His voice, over the years, has developed into a very rich deep baritone. But what impressed me most was his dancing and acting.
Upon reflection, what impressed me more than those things in his work in Songs for a New World was how he was able, with his heart, to transcend himself, as it were, from being my son Evan into carrying the message of the songs he sang into the hearts of the audience. What does this mean?
In my view the purpose of art is to uplift people who in their normal lives are downtrodden in spirit, mind or body. Live theatre, more than anything I know except sleep, helps people to forget their problems, and to feel connected to something higher, something more pristine. Live theatre lifts people up and refreshes them. As Tina said in a comment here last week:
…theatre saves lives. Art saves lives. Compassionate teachers save lives….
How?
In the play by Jason Robert Brown, it was done by high school kids who are just regular kids but who, when they took the stage and started acting, became something else. They became channels of higher things, one might say. They used their voices and bodies through song and movement to bring the audience to places of purity and beauty that they don’t normally experience in their lives.
The actors were focused on their roles. But the audience was focused back. It was almost as if the audience was looking beyond the actors, trying to find something in the characters that the actors that would lift their burdens, something to give them hope. That’s what I was doing, anyway. I found it.
Evan and Emilio and Aviv and Jafar and the others were portraying slaves on the deck of a Spanish sailing ship in 1492, but they opened the door to more than that for me and the other audience members. It wasn’t just because the students at Eagle Rock have failed in traditional public schools and have seen a lot of life that they were able to bring such power to their characters. It doesn’t matter, what matters is that director Meghan Tokunaga-Scanlon was able to help each actor express deep human truths, in this case primarily through song.
What of us? Are we not directors ourselves? Do we not try to bring stories to full expression in our field of storytelling in the language classroom? Do we in our foreign language classrooms, as playwright Brown and director Tokunaga-Scanlon and the Eagle Rock Theatre have done, endeavor, for a time, to give our students a view deeper into or out of their worlds in what are arguably very dark places, American schools, via the medium of live theatre?
If the purpose of art is to give hope, if the general purpose of education is to uplift, then the Eagle Rock actors will by the end of today have spent three evenings in a row doing that. I will not soon forget the performance I saw last night. Was it perfect? It never is. Did it uplift? Most assuredly so.
It leads to a question. If we are ourselves as foreign language educators can be said to resemble directors trying to bring our stories to life in our foreign language classrooms, should we not try, through the skills and strategies that we bring to teaching using comprehensible iput, to offer something to our students that is more than mere language instruction?
This would be in keeping with the research, so the question is just. It is not a rhetorical question. I’m asking the group. Do we not, as foreign language educators using live theatre to teach our languages, have a responsibility to make our classes into places where children can actually and in fact focus uniquely on the message and thus be carried high, or should we use storytelling to teach mere words connected to a curriculum?