The after school program that I wok for has a theatre class that all of the children in the program attend. At the end of the year they have a big production which all the children are supposed to be in.There is a theatre teacher who comes once a week to teach this class. I do not teach this class but I do teach theatre separately to my kinders. As we start to get ready for the big show, I help out the theatre teacher since I have the background and they usually need a staff person who knows the show. About three weeks before the show was to be performed, the teacher had it with our students. I totally understand because our school has very difficult kids. Their behavior is often chaotic, unfocused, disrespectful, and disengaged. At this point, they still didn't know a lot of their lines, the dances were sloppy, and transitions were just basically not happening. The theatre teacher walked out on our rehearsal one day. In some sense I can totally understand the exhaustion and frustration. However, in another sense, you can't just give up on kids. These kids especially have probably already experienced a lot of people giving up on them. For the next week or two I took over running the rehearsal to give the regular theatre teacher a chance to get some space from them and regroup. With a little positive encouragement from me, a lot of prayer, and some extra rehearsals, they were getting caught up to where they needed to be. The theatre teacher was able to come back a lot more encouraging to them. I was very grateful for this as I think the kids needed to see that she had not given up on them.
Although it was a challenging experience for me, it was also in a way really life giving. This was the biggest production I have ever directed (even though it was only for a couple of weeks). It was really rewarding to see them improve and actually be excited again to practice. It's hard for me to watch rehearsal where the kids make it seem like asking them running a scene again is like asking them to saw off their fingers.
During our last rehearsal, we had all the kids backstage for the first time to practice how it would be for the show. I was the only one backstage who really knew the show. I was basically the stage manager. It was pretty chaotic and I am embarrassed to say that I did not handle it well. The theatre teacher even said to me, "You are more stressed out than I am." I know this about myself. I know that I get really stressed on performance day and basically look like a chicken running around with my head cut off. I am short with people, really task oriented, and a bit of a control freak. I usually can't even really catch myself in the midst of it to stop and pray because I am just going non stop. It was a good reality check for me when the teacher said that to me. It's very obvious to other people when I get stressed like that. I don't like that the kids have to get the brunt of most of that. I had some people pray for me that night that I would not operate in that way during the show. Thankfully God really met me on the day of the performance. The kids did very well. Things were still a bit chaotic, but I felt pretty calm in the midst of it. A lot of the other adults involved in the performance lost their minds. They were more out of control than the children. Praise the Lord for protecting me from all of that, because usually I would have been just as crazy as they all were.
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