| Question for Posters Who Work in High School Theatre | |
| Posted by: JereNYC (JereNYC@aol.com) 11:57 am EST 02/07/18 | |
| In reply to: Woke Students Shut Down A High School Production Of 'Hunchback' - mattyp4 04:37 pm EST 02/06/18 | |
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| So, I know there are a few posters here who actually direct or otherwise work with students at the high school level, and I've always wondered how plays and musicals are chosen for production in the first place. I should say that I attended a very small (about 1000 students over 4 grades), mostly white, suburban public high school in the late '80's. In the theatre department (I say "department," but the reality is that we had one teacher, untrained in theatre, who taught a couple of acting classes, a couple of art classes, and a couple of English classes, who directed the plays and musicals), there were no minorities at all of any kind. When the school did FAME one year, they somehow recruited one black student to play Leroy, a guy who'd never performed before and likely never did again. Anyway, that's the sort of high school theatre environment that I came up in. The way that the school schedule was set up, a student could only participate in one after school activity because all of these things were happening at the same time, immediately after the end of the school day. So you could do the play in the fall or you could, for example, be on the football team. Doing both was not an option. So the population of "usual suspects" was not large. So, when you're a drama teacher at this level, how do you choose material for your students? Do you choose material that you know will be suited to the talents of the students you're sure to have on hand or do you choose more challenging material that won't be such a perfect fit, but that might attract students not otherwise interested in drama? At this level, I imagine few, if any, of the students have ambitions to go into performing arts as a career and are mostly doing the school play to have a good time and see what it's like. Does the idea of "let's all have a good time" factor into choices at all? |
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| Previous: | Woke Students Shut Down A High School Production Of 'Hunchback' - mattyp4 04:37 pm EST 02/06/18 |
| Next: | re: Question for Posters Who Work in High School Theatre - IvyLeagueDropout 12:23 am EST 02/08/18 |
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