Footsteps in the Snow

and

Theatre

Walking  on  Water

This winter has been cold enough to freeze most of the lake,

providing wide open spaces to walk, skate, ski, and snowshoe.

On sunny days the brilliance can be overwhelming.

 

YouTube Video

Walking onstage

As most of you know, Avril is a drama teacher at a high school in West Vancouver. Each year

the Theatre Company performs a play. This year's production was the published play entitled

Radium Girls

which Avril co-directed with her colleague Jenn.

I attended the play on its fifth night, sitting with Avril and her co-director on a second floor overlooking the stage below. The use of space was unconventional. The directors chose to use alley style theatre. In alley style, the stage area is a rectangle on the floor where the audience usually sits. The stage area lies between the audience which is divided and seated on both sides, a variation on theatre in the round used by Shakespearean companies. The actors also use the elevated stage at one end of the alley for various emphatic scenes. There are actor entrances and exits, which include using the "stage", via the four corners of the space, plus up the middle of the two sets of audiences.

Actors come and go in close proximity to the sitting audience, nothing that could trip the actors can be left in the aisle ways.The audience is made a participant by accommodating the actors' movements in and out: the audience is aware but agrees to ignore the exits and entrances taking place. Actors turn to face and speak to the audience on either side, and sometimes there are separate sets of dialogue happening alternately, at each end of the 'stage' area. This has the audience watching actors, back and forth as if watching a tennis game, and it amused the actors to see the audience's heads moving back and forth in unison.

Using a large space and having the audience on both sides makes the choreography of movement extra important. As you can imagine, it's a blocking challenge for the director, as to where actors stand etc., as well as a challenge re lighting and voice projection.

For visual proportion, actors can never stand too close to one another, in order to use the largeness of space etc. In rehearsals Avril carried a pole as she walked among the players to indicate to them when they needed to back away from each other. They'd automatically start backing up whenever they saw Avril and the pole coming! The alley presentation is very complex but the result is an intimacy between audience and actors, and I found the result was very natural, not at all "staged"!

The plot is based on the true story of young women, employed and underpaid, who were part of the WW1 war effort with their job of painting the numbers on watches which were worn by the soldiers. The women were encouraged to keep their brushes sharp by using their mouths and lips, something that seems like a shocking workplace violation to us now. But it happened. Plus, to make the numbers visible in the darkness of the trenches, the paint contained radioactive radium, and the radium was causing oral cancer in the women. The women were repeatedly told that their efforts could literally mean life or death for the boys overseas, and even when the results began to show up, they were slow to draw a connection between the paint and their illness. When they did, their concerns about the cause were not accepted by authorities, including by a medical doctor and a judge, who were part of the cover up for a terrible and costly sandal. Approximately 40 women died as a result.

This year there were two trios of actors for the lead women roles. Each trio performed for three nights.

Radium was hailed as a cure all and thought harmless. For one thing it brought X Rays to the war effort and to world medicine. It was assumed to be harmless, though Madame Currie herself eventually died from working with it. The story progression is bringing justice to this injustice, highlighting the women and their female supporters (including a feisty woman reporter and the wife of the employer responsible) who are moved and bravely speak up. Brilliantly and emotionally performed, these high school students moved a rapt audience to the point of tears. I could see people leaning forward as they watched. Such use of drama can cause an audience to make their own connections to this sort of societal horror and empathize with its ragged course.

Each year Rockridge's productions bring particular issues to focus, from well known plays like Pippin to devised plays (written by the actors) about dilemmas faced by teenagers (e.g. relationships, living with technology) to this year's interesting human rights/political/environmental topic...always leaving the audience with something to think about.

But more importantly, there was another real life drama happening behind the scenes, among the cast and directors: deep bonding through the friendships formed, between students and between students and the adults working with them. The experience of creating something of worth and quality together, of being guided by mature adults through the process, of moving and handling heights and depths of emotion, and just the experience of buckling down to a cycle of hard work, is truly a priceless gift. For this purpose drama in schools is incredibly rich. It introduces important values and experiences, all positive precedents that will stay with these students forever.

Very Proud of Avril