A Simple Joyful Life:
A Director's Training Approach to Youth Theatre
(published in PerformInk: 3-5-04)

After 20 years of teaching theatre and creative writing to risk youth, Free Street artistic director Ron Bieganski decided to put pen to paper and record his organization's progressive training techniques. Bieganski began work on the book-which is still in its developmental stages-when he took part in the European Union's "TheatreFormen" on Youth Theatre last summer. Free Street programs-which include MadJoy Theatrics, PANG, Arts Literacy and Arts Connect-work with over 1,200 youth and perform for approximately 10,000 people each year. Over the past 35 years, they have taken their unique performance art on tour to 14 countries and 38 states. This is part 2 of a series of articles on training for theatre. Part 1 ran in American Theatre Magazine's January 2004 issue and can be read online at www.freestreet.org. PANG will present The Angel of Moloch, a multi-media event that combines various aesthetics such as hip-hop, be-bop, beat, video and broken word inspired by Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" at the PAC/edge Festival (Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport) March, 13, 20 and 27 at 9:30 p.m. and April 3 at 2 p.m. For more tickets or info on PAC/edge, call 773/722-5463.

BY RON BIEGANSKI

In developing a training process for working with youth at Free Street, I started with what I thought was a very obvious question: What is the most basic talent for an actor? My response was to develop a specific training system that forms the basis of MadJoy Theatrics' work, a Free Street program that works to create new forms, structures and languages in order to tell non-autobiographical stories. I will begin with the idea of talent, talk philosophically about acting from a non-performance place and then move into a specific training idea. I have also included a youth response to the training to better illustrate what's going on in a beginner's mind as they learn. Our idea for what talent is comes from distilling many concepts into an essential form. For Free Street, talent is the ability to be filled emotionally, while at the same time expecting nothing. Talent is also the ability to react intimately (emotionally open), immediately (reacting instantly, both emotionally and physically) and spontaneously (reacting in your own unique way) within an imaginary situation. By this definition, talent can be developed. Free Street's initial work approaches the idea of acting from a non-performance place. We do a lot of physical work that develops the concept of release within our student's bodies. Release is a letting go of your muscles, while energizing yourself with breath. While developing release, we also work on a meditative stillness of the mind. This meditative stillness is not zoning out or an inner focus-it is a simple clarity, where your awareness is outward, where worded thought is quieted and the ego is diminished. This allows the student to explore performance as a natural by-product of being in the moment. Emotional work is not introduced until students have a grip on the ideas of stillness and what it is like to be non-judgmental and living in the moment. Dance movement work like contact improvisation or an exercise we call curved space promotes being energized non-judgmentally in the moment. This enforces the idea of performance flowing from a non-performance place. It is important for them to understand this concept without an excess of emotion flowing through their bodies. If emotional work is added too early in the process, the student's body will not remember the previous work and they will try to push out emotion like they're trying to take a crap. It takes a few weeks for the students get their minds and bodies to a place where they are open, energized, non-judgmental and playful. Although curved space looks a little like modern dance, the students must not think of it as dance. They just need to explore while playing the game. Curved space starts by picking a single point on your body-the forehead is a good place to begin-to focus on. Leading with the point they explore the way their body moves in an infinite variation of curvilinear movements that all circle back on themselves. All paths explored should be curvilinear, meaning that they should curve back onto themselves. The curving back onto yourself keeps the exercise within a contained area, and teaches that the energy from one moment can be brought back into yourself and immediately launched into another movement. As the exercise begins, tell your students to connect their breath to their movement. The breath is music. The breath is involved with what they are doing. The breath does not reflect what they are doing; it is in the fiber of each muscle movement. Stillness is a speed. (This is not a contradiction to the idea that each movement doesn't come to a stop before the next one begins. That is because 'stillness of your body' is not stopping-it is moving very little.) There is no slow motion-just moving slow-and there is no fast motion-just moving fast. This may seem like a small difference, but I feel "slow mo" begins to have too much thought and judgment to it.

Explore with little bursts of energy. This will add even more surprising dynamics to what you are doing. A burst of energy like a roller coaster that has just crested the hill.

In the beginning, instruct your students to explore with their eyes closed. Closing the eyes eliminates outside influence and judgments. Move smaller and slower with eyes closed as a precaution. After a minute or two, they may slowly open their eyes. Nothing changes, except now they can travel into open spaces on the studio floor. The awareness should be outward into where they are moving, not inward like a dancer staring lovingly into a mirror at a disco. They are not dancing. They are exploring without it being good, bad or ugly. This exercise will develop a non-judgmental freedom of movement when repeated over a couple of months. The muscles will learn to not judge and the mind will follow. The breath will bring focus and will become the student's music for their body. Start with following one point and when the student is easily moving without judgment-move to following two points at the same time. The following was 15-year-old Jasmine Harris' response to curved space: "Curved space, ah... I never thought I'd move the way I have while doing that exercise. I remember watching Ron demonstrate it, thinking, 'He's got to be nuts if he expects me to do that.' But at some point you just learn to let it go...and suddenly the whole room falls away, and you're not moving anymore-you're getting sucked in by a vacuum on all sides. Or you're just flowing, I can't explain it-you're just ...there, forming new shapes of being, realizing that there are more than four muscles in your body. And you can hardly hear it when someone tells you to stop; it seems like the voice is coming from your mind like some sort of telekinesis, and you don't want to listen. So you're just doing this crazy stuff like handstands or rolling all over the floor ...after we did the thing three days straight, though, it got to be more about finding new ways to move, really extending yourself. If you find yourself thinking, 'I can't do this, I've run out of ways to move,' then you stop for two seconds, take a deep breath, forget to think and let your body do the first thing that it thinks to do. After the first week I ached in a new place every hour...well now, I just plain feel like Jell-O."

After two decades of working with youth, it is still amazing to me how this creative work allows the student to grow in more ways than just as an actor. Our foundation work could be considered creating a "still point" in a chaotic composition. The one point that is silent allows all the other moving thoughts to be put in perspective. Like in a composition on stage when everything is always moving the audience gets dizzy, the stage is not easily understandable. If you stop one person from moving, all the other elements begin to make sense in relation to the still point. I have watched youth add this simple element into their daily life and everything becomes a little clearer for them. I see youth with such chaos in their lives and when they take the work we do and apply it to their own lives, I see them able to build, not destroy, the life they would like to live. I see youth discover they have a talent for a simple, joyful life.