Student Teaching: Documentary Theater

Here's the situation: I am a student teacher at a middle/high school in Brooklyn. Today I taught my 4th class of a unit on Documentary Theater to a theater class of juniors and seniors. The form of documentary theater that we are doing is sometimes called interview theater or verbatim theater-the dialogue is taken word-for-word from interviews with people somehow connected to an event or subject matter.

"The Laramie Project" is a well-known documentary theater play, centered around the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young man in Laramie, Wyoming. He was targeted, tortured and killed because he was gay. The members of the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie, Wyoming and spent weeks there interviewing people directly and indirectly connected to Matthew Shepard and the tragedy that was the brutal end of his life. When they left they had done over 200 interviews. From those interviews they created the characters and dialogue for the play, one of the most widely performed plays in the country now. I saw the show with the original cast from the Tectonic Theater Project when it was off-Broadway. It was the most moving piece of theater I've ever seen.

Below is a link to the Matthew Shepard Foundation, the organization founded by Matthew's parents. Their vision is to "Replace Hate with Understanding, Compassion and Acceptance” through a variety of educational and outreach programs, and by continuing to tell Matthew’s story.

http://www.matthewshepard.org/our-story

"The Walk" is the working title of the interview theater project I am developing with the students. The piece is centered around the SlutWalk movement. What is a SlutWalk you ask? This past January Michael Sanguinetti, a Toronto policeman, said the following at a college talk on personal safety:

"You know, I think we're beating around the bush here. I've been told I'm not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized."

This comment incited an international movement of marches called, "SlutWalks" to protest what many believe to be a society that blames the victim and not the system. The students that I'm working with had a range of reactions to the name, "SlutWalk." I have mixed feelings about it myself.

The students have created characters around short bios that I gave them. The characters are in some way related to the SlutWalk movement, some indirectly, some more directly. They did character work, interviewed each other in character, dictated the interviews and edited them. Today they brought the interviews in and read them in small groups to each other. It's a difficult subject matter and our time is so limited. The curriculum I originally wrote for a documentary theater project, centered around 9/11, is actually two units: creating the piece and then organizing it and putting it up as a production. The students involved in "The Walk" are doing everything in four classes and one rehearsal--then they have a staged reading on Monday, 11/14!

I'll update next week after the staged reading.

This image of the Toronto SlutWalk was taken from:
http://generationvegan.tumblr.com/post/4324013478/slutwalk-toronto-3-soo-amazing



For more information on SlutWalks go to:
http://www.slutwalknyc.com

DG