Collaboration Continues to Yield Confidence and Learning

Watching my students work with Robert Walsh is freshly inspiring every year. Eliot Short Term Treatment has just completed its fourth year of collaboration with the Actors' Shakespeare Project, and each year has seen students taking their learning and performances to new heights. For the past four weeks, Bob Walsh has helped my students use both the pen and the stage to access Shakespeare's language and storytelling, and as they've examined love, jealousy, loyalty, and betrayal in Othello, they've come to see the themes and circumstances of their own lives mirrored in a story so old it is difficult even to read. As in years past, it was again a powerful experience to watch my students explore the possibility that to struggle may be universally human, that their circumstances may not be as isolating as they seem. Once again, as I watched Bob challenge my students to dig into their characters' desires and fears, I saw them digging into themselves.

Largely through Bob's tirelessness and passion, our collaboration has gained greater depth and breadth each year. True to form, this year saw the most powerful and dynamic student performances yet, with students staging three scenes from Othello for an audience of peers, caseworkers, actors, clinicians, teachers, administrators, and group care workers. With student input stronger than ever, student voice this year guided script edits, fight choreography, blocking, and live sound. Students collaborated in the development of original soundtracks for their scenes using audio recording technology, and in a moment of great creative insight, one student envisioned and put forth a teleprompter design that allowed students to perform without scripts in hand for the first time ever. Though both acting and performing for an audience were new and challenging experiences for every student, not a single student expressed upon reflection the sentiment that exploring Shakespeare through a more traditional classroom approach would have been better. Robert Walsh and ASP have once again helped my students discover fun in academia and contemporary significance in the arcane. Perhaps most importantly, ASP has helped my students find the courage to engage with and embrace something new. No matter the context or subject, real learning requires courage, and my students have proven themselves brave indeed. As one student wrote in response to the famous line from Julius Caesar:

I move forward with my life and rely on what's mine.

Can’t rewind for my past I left behind

They say, “Cowards die many times before their deaths.”

Well, I choose to fight until I have nothing left.

-DM

Evan Gentler

English Teacher, ESTT