Elinor Grage is an actress. This .png)
past academic year, she has served as an English Teaching Assistant at a Catholic High School located in a gorgeous town of 7000 inhabitants called Odry. Her host school prepares mostly female students for future careers as kindergarten teachers, teaching assistants, social workers, nurses and massage therapists. True to her passion for acting, Elinor included acting experiences in her everyday English classroom, discovering that acting, teaching and learning a foreign language complement each other surprisingly well. After school, Elinor has met her students and colleagues in a tutoring club, in a crafts club and in a Czech class. Reflecting on her 10 months far away from her home, Elinor admits that there were times when she was homesick, but, at the same time, she felt overwhelmed with kindness. Her students invited her to their towns, teachers kept her busy with weekend trips, and she did some special activity with her Czech mentor at least twice a month. Throughout the year, Elinor has developed an acting workshop, and she has traveled to eight different types of school to introduce students of her fellow grantees to acting. Now, Elinor has started medical school, so we look forward to learning about the commonalities of acting and medicine in a future blog post.
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“We’ll go around the room…please tell me your name, and if you have ever acted before”
This is how I started each of the 8 theater workshop days I held across the Czech Republic this year. Surprisingly, the nearly unanimous reaction to the latter was “no”. I had expected more people to respond with memories from an embarrassing elementary school musical, or an extracurricular club, but between 90 and 95 % of students answered with no previous experience.
I had a surprise for them–I let them all know they were in fact very serious, experienced, practiced actors.
This is how I started each of the 8 theater workshop days I held across the Czech Republic this year. Surprisingly, the nearly unanimous reaction to the latter was “no”. I had expected more people to respond with memories from an embarrassing elementary school musical, or an extracurricular club, but between 90 and 95 % of students answered with no previous experience.
I had a surprise for them–I let them all know they were in fact very serious, experienced, practiced actors.
An example: If I see my friend Sue at the store and I want her to know that I’m happy to see her, I’ll smile and exclaim a hello, even if I am not feeling well. I am acting the part of someone happy to see Sue. Conversely, if I know that being too friendly with Sue will result in an hour long conversation, and I am very busy that day, I might give her short answers, even if I am feeling chatty myself.
The point is that to be social is to be theatrical! Never are we expressing the exact thing we are feeling. We use our innate acting skills to play the character of the person we want to be. So, I used the rest of the workshop time to try to prove that to them. Using a beloved professor’s exercise from college, we worked on specifically non-verbal acting skills. I split the class into pairs and gave each pair a secret scenario to act out, from Person A gossips with Person B, to Person A asks Person B for $10.
The only catch–every pair’s script was the same. They did not have to concoct an elaborate script–they only needed to count to ten.
PERSON A: 1 (motions for PERSON B to come closer)
PERSON B: 2 (said loudly)
PERSON A: 3 (whispers this and motions for PERSON B to keep their voice down)
PERSON B: 4 (whispered, as a sort of confirmation)
PERSON A: 5 (whispers this with much glee)
PERSON B: 6 (as a sort of added detail. Also much glee)
PERSON A: 7 (points to someone farther away and giggles)
PERSON B: 8 (points as well and snickers)
PERSON A: 9 (reminds PERSON B to keep their voice down)
PERSON B: 10 (understands)
Then it was up to the members of the class to guess what their scenario might have been. You may have guessed that the above scenario is gossip. With very few exceptions, students were able to guess what each scenario was very easily. Sometimes if a student had particular enthusiasm about acting I might challenge them a bit further, but really the point is to show them how easily their scenes are guessed, even on the first try. Again, I’m not trying to teach them to act. I’m trying to prove that they are already actors.
The point? (you might ask)
Arguably this entire year has been my biggest acting feat to date–trying to communicate with my community despite a major language barrier. I couldn’t use my English words to express my needs, so I often had to rely on exaggerated expressions and elaborate demonstrations to communicate.
The first four of these workshops was a nest activity in my region. I was encouraged by the enthusiasm and participation from these schools so I decided to present the idea during a grantee conference thinking it might inspire some other grantees. Unexpectedly, many schools invited me to teach the workshop myself.
It was an opportunity to see other corners of the Czech Republic that I thought were too far to visit before and has thus become one of my favorite experiences here. In the above map I have marked all the cities I have taught at during my theater tour. I was especially happy that grantees from farther away (particularly Louny and Chomutov) invited me to teach. I formed tighter bonds with ETAs from other regions and feel like I got a fuller breadth of experience of the Czech Republic.
And it also made me fall in love with my town even more. From experiencing other grantee towns, I can appreciate and know exactly how special my town is. In Odry, the tiny town (or as my students joke–village) has a hill poking out from behind buildings in every direction. It is completely silent at night. On a walk of my town I can get an ice cream in the square, visit the new baby goats on the other side of town, and watch as the single-car train makes its hourly trip out of Odry (every two hours on the weekends). I buy ingredients for whatever dinner sounds good the day of, because nothing is ever too far away. I’ve got a stash of cat food lying around for when the village cats come around. Life is peaceful here, probably the most peaceful it will ever be, and I will miss it greatly.
