The girls always come through

Since January we have been working on a new film. It is meant to be a companion piece in tone and content to the film we created last year, The Road. The title of our new piece is Shadows in Time. It is about the racism the Stardale girls face in their day to day lives.

I began working with the girls back in January at our Wednesday night sessions. Generally, we  begin the evening talking about incidents of racism the girls have had to endure, how they were made to feel, did they feel they were in any physical danger and so on.

After talking about it, I send the girls away with some markers and a few recipe cards and ask them to write their feelings down. This is the way we have worked on all the projects I have been involved with at Stardale, going back to Committing, a staged performance about youth suicide in First Nations communities, some 8 years ago.

I have no doubt that the way I work would drive some people crazy to watch. This for a number of reasons. First of all, while we all know that many people are terrified of public speaking, it’s been my experience that the same is true of what we might call public writing, which is what this is. I am sympathetic to this.

Many people come out of school with a strong aversion to writing. Maybe this comes from seeing too many red marks on work they have submitted for grading. Maybe thanks to spell check and autocorrect they have no innate ability to spell anything correctly. As bad as this may  be for adults, remember most of our girls are in junior high or early high school.

I assume (correctly) that some of the girls will be reluctant to share anything and I put absolutely no pressure on them to come up with something. In fact, when I send them off to write on their own, more often in small groups, I say, “Write something if you can, but if you can’t that’s fine too. Don’t let it ruin your evening. Whatever you do, have fun!” I’m aware that many of these girls have a lot of complications in their lives. Some of them might just need a refuge for a few hours midweek. I respect that.

Secondly, although we talk at the beginning of our sessions about racism or whatever, I never make any suggestions as to what they should write about. It’s tempting for educators to want to exert some control over the content, I get that. But this is meant to be a story told in the girls’ own words, and I stay very faithful to that principle.  

I have overseen collective creations before, both in the professional theatre and in university. In such cases I can be autocratic at times, especially as we come closer to opening night and someone has to make a decision. But that is never the way I work with the Stardale girls.

At the end of the night, the girls hand me their cards, sometimes they are written on, some may have a picture drawn on them, some may be blank. I take them, no comment, no judgement. Occasionally one of the girls will want to read to the rest of us what she has written. That is always a special moment that inevitable leads to tears.

As I pack up my bag at the end of the night, I hopefully have something on those cards that I will be able to use for our final script. Hopefully. If not, tomorrow is another day and maybe a few more of them will find the courage to write something on their cards.

Working this way is not for the faint of heart. It can be nerve-wracking at times, but over the years I have learned to have faith and trust that the girls will give me enough raw material to create a script from.

This year, as in all the other years, the girls have not let me down. My faith was rewarded.

The girls always come through.