Run through day...

Saturday is always a tough day. We start at 8, but the students don´t arrive until as late as 9am. We always start late, as everything does here. Between two or (in this case) three teachers, we wrangle nearly 40 students ranging from ages 15 to over 30 into the space, divide them as we can and work as much as we can until 5pm. The work is exhausting, let alone trying to focus that many students, when many of them only get together once a week and have to work with a group that has been coming every day. I am seldom clear on which is more difficult, wrangling adolescent hormones or Shakespeare!

Today was a very productive day though. I never cease to be impressed by these students. Today, many of them arrived, after a week away from their last session of choreography and all remembered it! They only had one session with the dance instructor, who worked like a demon to teach them a choreography and that was a week ago! I could never do that!!
There were some who felt a little underused today, as we concentrated primarily on working the dance into the scene, and those only involved in the prologue were sidelined a bit, but when we put everything together, I was really impressed.
In essence, we are presenting a scene from Romeo and Juliet. We start by doing a choral reading of the Prologue and proceed to perform the ballroom scene with a dance in the middle. The scene is being performed by students who are in attendance all week long. The prologue and the dance are being performed by 2 groups, formed from among those who can only attend class Saturdays. So the group is disparate. Many have not really had much chance to see the work of others, in other groups. Today was really our first chance to put it all together. The result was very impressive. Though parts still obviously need work, it is really starting to look and sound like a real Shakespearean scene...in Spanish!!

Of course, issues and obstacles continue to arise. Today a few were missing, some left early. The boy playing Romeo is involved with another one of the students and is having a hard time playing the romantic lead to anyone else. But the constant desire to progress, to improve, to advance and to go further is in them all. I have much to be nervous about, but so much more to be proud of already with this group.

Tomorrow, they are presenting a scene from the Salarue project they organised before I arrived. It will be held in the public square, in the midsts of a huge public festival. I think they may have more challenges ahead of them than they realise because performing in the Centro is somewhat like performing a play in the middle of the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. But nonetheless, I am certain they will rise to the challenge.

We were talking last night about how the circumstances of life in El Salvador would seemingly make theater nearly impossible to do, but for the tremendous will of people here to better their lives. And it´s always amazing to see how art is often a great place to start when we want change.