The Step-Back Rule

Children take center stage while the workshop leader remains one step back at the edge of the action.

One of the most important lessons I learned from my friend and mentor Corrado about leading theater workshops for children and teenagers came at the end of an end-of-workshop performance.

I have never liked the term “showcase”; in fact, I simply do not understand it.

For me, as for many of my colleagues, May and early June are the most intense time of the year.

Almost all workshops end with a public performance and, although for me this is simply the workshop’s final session—never its purpose—my days become a frantic cycle of rehearsing, preparing music, reassuring teachers, hauling baskets of materials in and out of the car, and worrying that I have forgotten something.

When I was starting out—many years ago now, alas—I was leading one-tenth as many workshops as I do today, yet the stress was perhaps even greater.

That is called “lack of experience.”

I have known colleagues who stopped leading workshops precisely because of the stress caused by these “showcases.”

No matter how thoroughly you prepare, once the performance begins, there is almost nothing more you can do.

The lesson I mentioned at the beginning came at the end of just such a performance: applause, happy children, happy parents, happy teachers, and me a few pounds lighter.

Corrado had brought me into the school where he was already working and handed a couple of his classes over to me. The previous year, I had observed his workshops and we had led several sessions together; now he was sending me in alone, while always remaining available to offer advice.

They were among the first classes I had ever led on my own.

In the end, his opinion mattered more to me than anything else, and it arrived right on cue:

“It was good,” he said. “You put so much into it... but where were the kids?”

BAM.

Like having a car door slammed in my face.

How right he was.

Because this work carries an enormous risk: turning THEIR show into YOUR show.

Placing your own ideas and your own vision of theater at the center, while turning the children into unwitting puppets.

I do not know whether it comes from ego or fear; perhaps it is simply a lack of trust.

But today I know for certain that my work is not evident in technical flourishes or elaborate direction. It is not evident in intricate choreography, futuristic lighting, or scripts so carefully crafted that only a shadow remains of the children’s own living words.

My work can be seen in the eyes of children and teenagers who are fully alive onstage: they inhabit what they do and say; they do not simply repeat; they are not terrified by words put into their mouths; they do not put themselves on display.

I know that I must remain one step back and avoid anything that might overshadow the children and teenagers.

Because I am not there to assert myself.

Because they are the show.