Tradition

"Who, day and night, must scramble for a living..."

-- "Tradition," the opening number of Fiddler on the Roof

--

I'm sitting in a university theater, watching the kids from my acting class perform "The Chicken Dance" as part of the musical revue that culminates the summer theatre camp. This particular number is a medley of several children's songs (they have now finished "Yankee Doodle" and moved into "Rubber Ducky"). The kids are ages 9-12.

My co-workers, two rows in front of me, are waving their arms and getting frustrated. They point, they hiss names. The artistic director looks at his watch, turns to someone and says that it's awful, it's all awful, and why don't they smile.

A kid onstage hears this and a smile jolts across her face. She forgets her place in the song and is a step late. Her eyes drop and her head makes the involuntary turn to check her place.

The choreographer yells for her to keep her head and eyes up.

Eyes start darting sideways as kids wonder if they were doing something wrong. The number disintegrates into unrehearsed confusion. Voices drop out as chests deflate. Stomps quicken and the accompanist tries to keep up.

"Don't rush," someone yells.

The kids slow down and the accompanist tries to keep down.

The artistic director says it's awful.

Hands flail. Kicks go awry. The number is over...thank God. There are scattered claps as the kids wander offstage, and everyone wishes they were anywhere but here.

The performance is tomorrow.

--

Teachers and artists, I think, must always struggle with the question, "Is this worth it?" The question is nothing new, and most of us find any number of reasons--good ones, too--that the answer is yes. Always and always, yes. The young must always be taught; the people must always be entertained and elightened; and if we don't, who will; and so on.

I know the answer is yes. And I know my reasons for believing that.

But sitting here in this auditorium, watching plastered smiles crack with uncertainty, wincing as tap shoes scrape the black paint from the wooden stage floor, I wonder.

--

A colleague asked me this morning how the summer program is going. He plans to watch the final performance tomorrow, he said, and was interested to know what he was getting into.

So I showed him a video I took two days ago of the tribute to Michael Jackson. The number had been conceived in the wake of the pop star's death. All of Jackson's choreography has been preserved in this difficult number, and the kids perform admirably.

When the video was over, my colleague asked if there were anything but song-and-dance numbers in the revue. I said no, and this began a long conversation about whether theatre could be used to turn kids into robots.

--

Don't get me wrong. The kids have fun and learn a lot. After a summer with us, they are ten times more prepared to work at our (or any other) theatre. Parents love to see their sons and daughters up on stage. Donors are impressed.

But there's a difference between directing and choreographing. The former implies taking the energy and ideas already there and simply pushes it towards a certain end. The latter implies taking what is already there and telling it where to move, and how, and what everything is supposed to look like. The results are as different as kids who only know to color inside the lines, and kids who know how to draw.

I know my complaint is a bit selfish. In four weeks, seven of my acting classes have been taken away so the kids could work on musical numbers--that's seven of twenty. It's hard to plan or make progress when you're not guaranteed time to work. It's a sad fact that in this camp as well as in this industry, song-and-dance gets most of the attention, and acting is an afterthought.

What happens when they are in their next show? They will wait for lines so they can start coloring. Any original instincts or ideas they will curb in favor of being told what to do. They will have no experience with improvising and will count it a waste of time. They will become automatons, following algorithms of steps and beats and notes, and their eyes will remain blank, their smiles plastered, their true creativity untapped.

--

Now the kids are in a line, acting like parts of a machine, building on each other. I've had them do the same thing in my acting classes, actually--it's a great improv exercise to add, one by one, the parts of a machine formed by human bodies. But there's one crucial difference. In my classes, the machine is different each time, the order varied, the participants creating something fresh and fun every time.

What I see now is an image of what they are becoming: cogs formed for a single purpose, one that is not their own. And I wonder.