the following podcast is produced or sponsored by a community member the content views and opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not reflect those of b m the following podcast is produced or sponsored by a community member the content views in opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not reflect those of b mc or the town of belmont b mc welcomes your comments at six one seven four eight four two four four three or email us at access at belmont media dot org involvement in theater in dominant is not just the actor's them a student's can gain a wide range of experiences in the theater through the performing arts program at belmont high school guru of belmont high school theater i guess your formal title is in group as a flam who is the producer and director of the belmont high school performing arts company yes thanks for coming over today thank you as you know just to provide somewhat of a road map i'd like to talk about the performing arts education and we start and then if we have time let's talk a little bit about the spring musical ok if that first tell us about yourself you've been in belmont in the belmont schools for a few years now this is my fifth year at the high school yeah and you have a performing  career outside of the high schoolers the high school the high school is my primary place where i spend my time i my what i like doing the best i want to do is direct plays and teach theat e so i think my artistic outlet as a director i get to do at my day job at the high school my other love in theater is improvisation so i do perform occasionally outside the high school i'm part of an improv group called comedy sports boston so i perform there sometimes for me it's actually a stress relieving out of place where i get to go and get on stage and go from to do improv where i don't have to be in charge of anybody and managing the room and running things i just get to go and play myself now when many people maybe even most people think of theater in high school i think they might think of the that you major productions the the fall play in the spring musical but there's really a wide a wider range of theatre activities there's broadway nights there is the high improv there the one act plays can you let us know i assume that each one of those has an educational objective to it can you tell us what you're after by that yeah sure i think you're correct that we have sort of two categories of shows the fall play in the musical in the big auditorium the sort of main stage shows and obviously because of the size of that venue more people see those productions and then the little theater productions one acts and broadway night and improv don't although i would say the audience size has grown significantly on those so we've started over filling that little theater for some of those shows in the last few years but the you know they all have the same broad educational goal which is that students are learning about the creative process of making theatre in all of those and there's obviously in every single one of those there's a difference so even the fall play i think often the focus on that is about acting and really diving into the text and taking it apart and exploring and understanding how to act individual moments the musical because of the size of the production both in doing any musical and the number of students we have involved and the number of things is often about how to take so many components of a show acting singing dancing scene changes caused this number of costumes and just the number of students involved and how to really manage all those parts to still make one complete looking  production i think fur improv and broadway night and one x it's a chance for students to really take ownership and sort of leadership and have their hands in the process in a way that is much more student driven and student directed so the broadway night performance you know one thing is just the opportunity for students on stage so in broadway ny we had this year we had twenty four different acts which probably was about forty something kids who performed on stage and my experience is that broadway night which is in the fall yeah is often involves students who end up not being in the musical i see different students there in the fall so you'll see a lot of those kids on stage in the musical but you're correct which is that on broadway night you really see those kids i think what's great about it is with a big musical you might have you know anywhere from four to ten kids who are your you know leading roles and they're more featured in you will definitely see them and you will definitely hear them everybody who's on stage in the musical is seen and heard at some point but broadway night you have you know those forty something kids every single one of them gets a chance to sing a solo at some  yourself or only four of you on stage in that number what you get to do and both the learning experience and also the opportunity to be on stage and showcase is greater in something like broadway night so trying to have offering both of those opportunities for kids is part of why i think having that in the fall before the musical in the spring is a great is a great opportunity for kids because it gives them the chance to do that and for broadway night the kids who perform it's mostly self directed so they choose the songs that they're going to do by themselves they learn the song on their own they stage the song on their own and they come in and they have a twenty to thirty minute rehearsal and coaching session jenny listen who choreographs our spring musical also directs broadway night but by direct she'll spend twenty to thirty minutes with each performance after the kids have already learned and rehearsed their song helping them fine tune it it's tweaking around the edges it's working on a bit of staging or really understanding something about how to communicate the meaning of the lyrics or the ideas in the song or figuring out some musical or rhythmical things to do with it and then send them off with here's what to work on now before you come back for production week and performances and i want to come back to the one act play and i want to make sure that we don't talk in shorthand for people who don't know what you want to plays are the one act plays is a performance in the spring where the plays are wrecked it by the students themselves so the focus is not only on the performance but it's on teaching the the direction yeah or the ability to direct yes so a eleventh and twelfth graders who direct the plays so they start actually this week all of the students who are interested just submitted to me statement of interest for directing  and once i have that roster of directors they're going to work on picking up play they're going to spend a lot of time reading a lot of ten to fifteen minute plays to find one that they think is the right match for them to direct that is interesting to them that they think will be stage a ball that will be fun to stage and then i will work with them a little bit once they've picked their plays on thinking about how to conceptualize the play and think about what they want their cast to look like in the stage to look like and what's important about the play and then they run auditions they cast the shows and they so my job is to pop into their rehearsals maybe once every week or two and sometimes i'll walk in and i will watch fifteen or twenty minutes of a rehearsal and i usually try not to say anything when i'm in the room to watch rehearsals and just see what they do and then check in with the directors afterwards and say how's it going what did you work on and try and say to them i noticed this actor could use some help with this or work on this or it seemed like you were struggling to figure this out and i just try and give them some tips and ideas and things that they could work on in a future rehearsal but i i really try and let what ultimately is on stage be their work as directors and i'm i'm there not to give the actors notes or directions or to tell them how to do things but just to support the directors and make sure that the whole of the evening fits together in terms of what order the shows go and does everyone have the scenery and the costumes and the lighting and the sound that they need for their show to be what their vision is and then stay out of the way and you just mentioned something that i really want to talk because one of the remarkable things at belmont high school and maybe it's true with every place but it is not simply the v performances onstage but it's the experiences school and i can't take credit for it because i arrived at the high school and said how does the technical production program work here and was astounded at the size of it and in some ways the level of specialization that students choose which is that so we have right now in the musical we have about eighty five kids who are going to perform in the spring musical we have about the same number who have signed up for a backstage crew for the musical and that's generally pretty regular is for for the fall play and for the musical we have over seventy kids consistently signing up to do back stage crew so the five and seven so hundred fifty plus kids in belmont high is thirteen hundred fourteen hundred yeah that's what i usually say around ten percent or over ten percent of the kids above the total student population will do something in theater before the end of the year wow that's that's pretty impressive isn't yeah it's a good it's a good statistic and i think the  in in particular because of a lot of a lot of other high schools obviously it's not true everywhere but i think a lot of other high schools even with a theater program that produces the number of shows in is of the same size as belmont high school you'll have a core group of twenty or thirty kids who work on the lights and work on the costumes and work on the scenery and work on the props and do everything and we have you know thirty kids who have signed up just for the set crew for the musical and those are kids who are going to come two or three days a week after school in the evening and build and paint scenery and some of those kids are going to specialize in that that's what they're going to do and they're going to get a really good education  what scenic design looks like and how to build things and how to paint things and how to run a set backstage and then you'll have some kids who are signed up for sat crew and they'll pop in once a week or once every two weeks and they might also sometimes go to a costumes meaning and learn a little bit about sewing and help with that and then they might show up for lights once or twice so the tech crew i think the structure is that kids can shop when they want there's not a strict attendance requirement and one of the things i say is if you come every single day and you are integral to building something that's awesome and if you come once to set crew and you try and build something and instead you build it wrong and then someone else has to fix it and you don't come back again your name is still in the program you're still part of the production and part of the show but it's actually what's impressive is that what that encourages is a lot of kids their freshman year sometimes they're soft more year that's what they'll do they'll show up a few times they're figuring it out and the kids who come back and say last time i only showed up a little bit but the next show i sign up for i want to actually get to do more what i saw then i saw the show and i saw the set and i want to have even more involvement and i want to do more lights one thing that strikes me from what i'm hearing you say is when word is experimentation it kids it not how do you react to their experimentation is one of my favorite words to use for the process of theater making because i think it is interval as to what they're doing no matter  what it is you know to me experimentation is trying something out with maybe an idea of what it where it's going to take you what it's going to look like at the end but you don't know until you do it is going to be successful or not and particularly in terms of broadening for what the conversation is right now in general about important educational skills for kids to be learning now and you know twenty first century educational skills experimentation is about trying stuff risk taking right having a vision for something and seeing where it goes and you have to not be afraid to do something and say that was wrong i failed at that i messed that up and that's not a bad thing because that's what it is you know in rehearsal a lot of times that's when you take a scene from a play and you're rehearsing it all you're doing is trying things you say what if we tried saying these lines this way or staging the scene this way and sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong and either one is fine because they're all things you learn along the way to figuring out what is the thing that is going to be correct so what strikes me is that in some ways or in this way the theater arts are more like the visual arts and the  the the music the instrumental the instrumental music and we had nicole pond on a few weeks ago and she talked about the visual arts where you try things out sometimes you discard things sometimes you like what you do and i was saying well when i played the french horn you either played the right note at the right time or you didn't so theatre is a lot like visual arts i think so you know i think a visual are you have the idea of a blank canvas and in theater it's a blank stage in some ways we're somewhere in the middle because because with the it are you you know we when we start most shows we start with a script you have some yes that is your roadmap but there's certainly when you take a script it's just words on a page and there are a lot of ways that you have to have to do things to honor the words and get it right and communicate with the ideas are inside of the script but there's also a huge number of possibilities for how exactly you execute that you can look at it why my one of my favorite things to do is  shakespeare which we do every other year in the fall because shakespeare inherently has that idea just from the tradition of how we do shakespeare you know in the modern world of you have to interpret the script in some way you have to decide how are we going to stage this what is the canvas going to look like what's the second to look like what are the costumes going to look like are we going to set it in a specific time period or era and what does that mean and how do we understand that and so it is starting from there but shakespeare also definitely has that connection to music which is when you're working with the text you have to get the interpretation of the words right the rhythm right the mea verse and the meter right so in some ways it pulls those two things together you mentioned twenty first education a few minutes ago and i'd like to give you a proposition and see how you react to it is ok if you in my mind the one impact of theatre education on twenty first education is the ability to teach students how to almost literally step in the  shoes of someone else and to and that would increase their ability to empathize and it seems like that's an important talent or an importance not a talent but an important skill to have whether you're in employment setting or any other setting do you do you agree with that or do you agree or disagree with it totally agree right now actually this year one of the things i'm doing is working on a professional development team with a group of social studies teachers and the topic we're spending the year working on and exploring is perspective taking and you know they're starting from the proposition that when you're looking at social studies history or current events or you know things that happen in the world are the result of individual people doing things and what's been fun in talking about perspective taking with those teachers is going back to the idea that what people say and what people do is a result of something that is inside of them in their head in their heart in their make up and then thinking about what that person right what a person is like what their personality is like and what the outside influences around them are that cause them to be the kind of person they are and behave the way they behave and theater is a natural way of doing that of having to ask that question and step into those shoes because you you can't in theatre when you're acting and playing a character be outside of the person looking at them you have to  understand and take on their experience we talk sometimes about lens you see the world through the lens of another person and i think that is a really valuable experience to have and it's it's not just in theatre that it happens i think english teachers and social studies teachers and humanities teachers are want students to do that and try to do that and in theater it's just inherent to what you do when when you work with high school students come to you for the first time in ninth grade or eleventh grade is there a path that every kid is different of course i think there's obviously some typical kinds of things so yes there are a lot of kids who show up having started at the chan or a doing their musical there and so a lot of kids if they do that and that's a good experience they come to the high school and they say i liked it there i want to try it here certainly you know belmont being you know a small enough town where we just have the one high school there's a lot of kids who've been seeing productions of the high school since they were kids they have siblings they have friends who have siblings in shows so they've been in the theater and seen things and they want to try it we also living in the boston area as we do i lot of kids come in having done things at watertown children's theatre or boston children's theat arlington children's theater so that opportunity and experience is a wide range just around belmont means a lot of kids come in and they say oh i like the other you also get a lot of kids who come and they say i have a friend who's been doing this and they had fun and they said come try this thing with me and they try it out so i would say freshman year a sophomore year we get a lot of kids who come in and say this is something i want to do some who to try it and a lot of kids who say i know i want to do this and then every once in a while we'll pick up some kids who get to their junior senior year and say i've been seeing my peers do this and i've never quite had the courage or the impetus to say all right i'm going to try it out and then they up and say this is the year that i'm finally going to do it in is it a you take everybody who comes we try and make a place in the performing arts company or we do make a place in the performing arts company for any kid who wants to participate so it's obviously a range we started talking about all the different shows we did yes so in the musical we have eighty five kids because we don't turn anybody away from performing in the musical so any kid who wants to be in the musical can be in the musical improv at the high school we have two different groups one is an improv tro and that any kid who wants to participate can be in the improv troupe and they come to rehearsal once a week and when we get to the shows they're on stage they're performing and stuff anyone who wants to do it tech crew is a open opportunity for any student who wants to come to join tag crew and as i said to come as often as they want as little as they want so and you know even broadway night and one acts we work as hard as we can to get as many of the kids who want to be in those shows on stage or backstage involved and you were talking a few minutes ago about the kids that come up through the channel you were can teach at the high school do you have system wide responsibilities i don't have specific systemwide responsibilities but i think that a strong high school program is built on strong kids coming in if i get kids who show up to the high school and aren't interested in theater they're not going to be doing theater if i get kids or show up to the high school and have never seen a play or participated in theater at all then i'm starting from scratch and i'd much rather have a group of kids come in every year who know what they're doing so the last couple years the middle school musical is in the spring after our high school musical finishes so i will spend some time going over there i'll pop into rehearsals at the middle school occasionally and see what's going on and just try and meet kids and have them know my face and my name and who i am and offer help when i can be helpful and supportive to that program and i think one of the things i'm looking forward to is continuing to do that and hopefully seeing that middle school theater program continue to grow i hope at some point in the next few years they get to do not just a musical but maybe they have an opportunity for some improv at the middle school or a play happening at the middle school or just more things happening there because all of that only makes all of the programs a better so we saw and hear a few years ago that there are maybe even last year in math was the last year yeah so he really has and he is it the channel contribute to the the chicago's at the high school this year the incoming freshman class at the high school is really big you know you can every year is obviously different but the number of students who are ninth graders this year who are already participate being in theater and jumping on stage is significant we had you know broadway night is six weeks into the school years so if you're a ninth grade that's early in the year to be on stage and we had ten and ninth graders and broadway and i this year which was i think most years we have two or three kids who managed to show up at the high school and get involved and get on stage and something that early and i one hundred percent attribute that to the kids who are in and he had a fantastic time being part of that show and it was a great show yeah it was good theater yes we're of time so we are going to have to bring you back to talk about the spring musical and i i know that you are busy beyond belief but as the spring musical gets closer we'll will bring you ok i'd be happy to talk about it i think that's well worth talking about and could feel quite a bit of time so we have been talking today with ezra flam ezra is the director and producer of the belmont high performing arts company in addition to having classroom responsibilities that belmont high school again as a thanks for coming over today i would like to thank you the listeners for tuning in t community conversations you can access community conversations on the b m c pod cast network at belmont media dot org and you can also access community conversations on i tunes by searching for the b m c podcast network you've been listening to community conversations i'm your host roger coulton i'll talk to you again in two weeks