from Laura Stewart! Day One

"Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp ....
- Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1993

Two nights ago, I sipped sweet Tanzanian chai in the darkness and waited. The power had gone out. I couldn't see anything, so I listened for the sound of a car horn at the lodge gate. In only a few minutes the 2011 ITLP team ought to be arriving from the airport. Then our teaching adventure would get underway. I had come to East Africa earlier than the others and was looking forward to my team's approaching reunion.

At about 10 p.m., the crunch crunch of gravel announced an arrival. Felicia, Rebecca, Kate, Lauren, Karis, and Abby piled out of two vans. In the light of my headlamp, I saw their tired, eager faces, and realized that in only two days, we'd begin leading our playwriting workshops at Tanzanian schools. What would our classrooms look like? How would our students respond to our theater exercises and writing prompts? These questions mixed in with my greetings. I think the whole team was entertaining similar questions.

The next morning (that's yesterday), our jet-lagged team dove headfirst into preparing and fine-tuning our lesson plans. St. Margaret's teachers face a new, joyful challenge this year - creating an original play - from scratch - out of the kids' writing. (Last year and the year before they created scripted plays as adaptations of Midsummer Night's Dream and Our Town). All three plays (one class at St. Margaret's, two at Nkoandrua Secondary School) will center loosely around a Shel Silverstein poem, but the content will come from the students' own writing and work. And I must admit that, during the course of preparation, our task sometimes struck me as daunting ... I wondered, as Toni Morrison wrote (see above), if our reach had exceeded our grasp.

Only one way to find out - and that's to try. "Joy lies in the doing," as Shakespeare said. This morning, plan in hand, my teaching partner Felicia and I set out to St. Margaret's Academy for our first day of theater and English instruction to a class of twenty 9-11 year olds. Our students, neatly attired in golden and green uniforms, greeted us politely.

It was soon evident that one thing they really loved was exercises involving group movement. They showed more hesitancy at standing out in any way - moving or speaking in front of their peers.

We faced similar challenges with our writing prompts. We noticed how students wanted to get answers 'right', and reach a group consensus. When responding to questions designed to draw on their individuality, they shied away from differentiating themselves. We worked to pull out specificity. When we encountered specific ideas or questions about God, family, culture, sports, education, nature, we were pleased. Specific answers are the stuff of good stories, and the means by which we connect to one another as people.

At the end of a long day, the bell sounded. Felicia and I hitched a ride home on a school bus. As we careened down dusty roads, my foot brushed up against a bag of raw chicken on the floor. I saw fields of coffee plants and matoake trees - those spindly but powerful plants that channel all their energy into the production of just one bunch of bananas.

And now night has fallen. Again, I am sitting in the middle of a power outage. I hear dogs bark outside and the low hum of music. I am grateful to be in Tanzania with ITLP. Theater has connected me to other people, expanded my sense of what is possible, and set me free from apprehensions. I know it can do all these things and more for our students, too.

- Laura Stewart, teaching artist, 2011 - St. Margaret's Academy