Matt Johnson and Kate Forbes Dallimore
A lemon on a stick, a pair of sunglasses, and a Spanish lamp walk across a stage. Anything can happen when the imagination of a child is encouraged to expand and create. Kate Forbes Dallimore and Stevie Ray Dallimore know this well, as they have witnessed it for the past six years doing just it—encouraging kids to let their imagination flow through the art of playmaking.
It happens twice a year, in the fall and spring. Kids come together to learn to write plays. They gather around a long, wooden table with their notebooks, pens, and ideas. Intermingled among the children are adults—volunteers—who work with the kids and teach them character development, how to write dialogue, and how to construct from their own imagination, a story with conflict and change. The children learn that they can create something that is meaningful, funny, and worth performing on stage. They learn what it feels like to accomplish something worthwhile.
The Muse of Fire Project (TMOFP) in Chattanooga, founded by Kate and Stevie Ray, has a mission of bringing kids together from different neighborhoods within Chattanooga to write short theatrical plays for performance. On a broader scope, Kate and Stevie Ray's vision is to help create a feeling of success in young people while building bridges across communities.
The kids gathered around the long table come from different neighborhoods and schools and represent diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. They come from schools such as Signal Mountain Middle school—which is 92.2% white and 13.7 % economically disadvantaged—and Calvin Donaldson Academy, which is 90.6 % black and 98.0% economically disadvantaged according to the 2013-2014 Tennessee report card. http://tn.gov/education/topic/report-card. Like Signal Mountain and Calvin Donaldson, many of Chattanooga's schools are racially and socioeconomically segregated, and TMOFP aims to bridge these communities. Most of the children do not know each other before the program, but by working together, they become a team. Each child contributes his or her own ideas to produce one collaborative show.
“Mix is good for everybody,” said Stevie Ray. “We have a diverse group of adults as well [who work with the kids], and the kids see that right away. We all listen to each other, and that is how their imaginations come alive.”
The kids engage in exercises to help tap into their imaginations, such as building character profiles. They start with animals and then move on to objects found in their bedrooms. They give each character a name, age, occupation, greatest wish, and greatest fear. They get to thinking of how a clock would feel or what a Spanish lamp would want. The characters become a starting point from which to build conflict and change. What results are plays about aliens seeking donuts or a bus named Gus trying to transport a rock group to a concert and the obstacles they have to overcome.
“The weirdest parts [of the plays] are the characters built through the project,” said Stevie Ray. “Someone once said that 'going to a Muse of Fire show is like seeing an off Broadway play meets Saturday Night Live meets the Muppets.'”
The unique ideas come from giving the kids free range to create: “We don't say 'no' to ideas or that it doesn't make sense, but try to get them [the children] to have that freedom,” said Kate. “But sometimes they come up with characters and write plays that make us think, 'how are we going to do this?'”
The children's plays often reflect their own realities, and though Kate and Stevie Ray shy away from profundity, sometimes the writing shows it without the child realizing what he or she has written.
“We had a child whose parents had gone through a divorce,” said Kate. “He or she wrote a play and we [the adults] couldn't figure out what it was about. But through rehearsal and performance, we realized it was a profound play about love and loss. They come up with epic ideas in small words, and though the words are small, the depth is still there—and sometimes they don't know what they are writing.”
“We had a kid who was from the Middle East and spoke English as a second language,” said Stevie Ray. “He wrote a play that was funny, yet it was an anti-war play called Mr. Chin and Mr. Mustache. He didn't know it was an anti-war play. He had a character that was a dinosaur—a Tyrannosaurus Rex—who helped end the war by bumping into Mr. Mustache's airplane [the bad guy] and knocking it out of the sky.”
One Muse of Fire parent, Elizabeth Kabalka, remembers her son's experience when he went through the program a few years back. On the night of the performance, he sat on the stage behind a podium with the letters spelling 'playwright' glittered across the front. He watched the actors bring his creation to life: a world where humans are at war against a race of giant spiders in the woods. As the characters descended deeper into the woods, the narrator announced that they were going deeper into the “uncreatively named—'The Darker Woods.'” The audience laughed. Kabalka's son sat up straighter. “He loved that people laughed at the parts he imagined to be funny,” said Kabalka. “He walked out from the show about three inches taller than when he walked in.”
The idea of giving a voice to kids in this fashion originated with a project that started over thirty years ago in Hell's Kitchen, a then underprivileged neighborhood in New York City. Both Kate and Stevie Ray, who had been working as professional actors in NYC, volunteered with The 52nd Street Project, a playmaking workshop that was developed to better the lives of children who lived there.
"Te first time I saw a 52nd Street show,” said Stevie Ray, “it was a staged reading in the basement theater of a restaurant on 42nd street. Kate was acting in it. The kid was sitting on a chair [on the stage] and the actors were in regular street clothes reading and moving around, bringing the script alive. I never laughed or cried so much in one sitting. It was great to see the kid watch his work in front of you. I was hooked immediately.”
Once hooked, Stevie Ray got involved.
“I got to play a kangaroo who played a banjo whose best friend was a horse. We fought and went to Jamaica, and then ended up singing a song together. We [the actors] wrote the music and recorded the song and gave the CD to the kid.”
Kate and Stevie Ray's replication of the 52nd Street Project carried over the musical component as well. Musicians create original scores for each child's play; the scores become part of the performance.
“I encourage the kids to write their own songs,” said Kate. “They start as either a monologue to the play they wrote, or a speech, or even a rap. Then I send it to a composer to put it to music. I had sent a monologue about making pancakes and toast in France and asked the composer to think 'Edith Piaf.'” What resulted was a beautiful French cabaret-style piece about pancakes and toast.
After the lights go down, the project aims to bring back kids who have gone through the program by providing summer programs and workshops for teens such as “Replay,” a playmaking workshop that dives more in depth, using prompts to inspire ideas.
“We took returning musers to the firehouse downtown, the Human Society, and a Shakespeare reading from The Twelfth Night, and used these three experiences as a launching point for plays. We got plays about a firehouse dog, stories with fires, firefights, and a dog with a Shakespearean name,” said Stevie Ray.
It is not a surprise that Shakespeare has become part of the program. It is a large part of Kate's professional acting resumé. In fact, the name of the program comes from the prologue of Shakespeare's Henry V. Kate's dream is to incorporate Shakespeare more into TMOFP by offering programs that engage students in learning Shakespeare in a fun and accessible way.
“It's not as hard as we think it is,” said Kate, “and it has so many benefits; it teaches focus.”
One way she plans to incorporate works from the Bard is through a program called “Breakdancing Shakespeare,” a concept she first became familiar with while working with the Hartford Stage in Connecticut. Using only Shakespeare's words, performers intermix breakdancing with lines from the play to create a sound and rhythm complementary to the dance. For instance, “Instead of a battle scene they have a dance off,” said Kate.
Engaging children in the creative process lets them see the possibility of what they can do.
“It is amazing to watch the kids go from the first show where they are shy and nervous, to the third show [in the weekend of shows] where they are all sitting up straight as if they are saying, 'that's mine, I did that!'” Said Stevie Ray.
Creating an experience of success in children while building bridges across communities is what TMOFP strives for. The benefits of the program have been revealed in different ways: they range from past musers using the plays they have written in their portfolios when applying to Chattanooga arts schools to parents stating that their child had started to read more on their own after participating in the workshop. But the success of the program is perhaps most realized at the end of the show—at the moment when the child playwright faces the audience, takes a bow and comes up taller.
For more information on how you or your child can become involved with The Muse of Fire Project, please visit themuseoffireproject.org.
Stevie Ray Dallimore