YWCA of the City of New York

I was very moved by Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, the story of a key figure of the civil rights movement who has long been in the shadow of Rosa Parks. I was first struck by her age; Claudette was only 15 when she refused to give up her seat on the bus, just a few years older than the 5th graders I teach in Sheepshead Bay. As a drama teacher, I was inspired to re-enact her first-person account of that day on the bus.

In January, my boss Anmarie Paul asked me to teach a drama class with a civil rights theme in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and I used a similar lesson plan to convey Claudette’s story. I started class with an eye contact exercise, in which I first asked students to move around the room and avoid making eye contact with each other. Then I asked them to only make eye contact with classmates whose skin was the same color as theirs. Immediately, some students bristled at this and pointed out that I was being “racist.” But I think the exercise gives an immediate sense of what it feels like to be separated, avoided, and excluded.

Next, I played a game called Portraits. At the suggestion of a word from me (like “freedom” or “togetherness”), the students strike a pose, as if I’m taking their photograph. I introduced neutral masks into this game, which requires an emotion or an idea to be conveyed bodily, without facial expression. Eerily, masks often free the actor to make even more striking emotional choices. There’s a haunting quality to the masks, and I think it is partly to do with the fact that by wiping away the individual face of the actor, each becomes a representative of all people, regardless of age or race or gender.

In acting out Claudette’s story, I used masks in different ways. Since the actors can’t talk (their mouths are covered), it reduces the story to its barest emotional elements. The kids had a chance to play many different characters in the scene, trying on different genders and races. There’s a famous Brazilian theater director and teacher named Augusto Boal, who practiced what he called “Theater of the Oppressed,” in which ordinary people had a chance to act out an incident from their lives in which they felt oppressed. First, they played the victims (themselves), but then they also tried on the roles of their oppressors. I think it’s a very interesting way to use theater in order to examine social issues, and our roles on and off stage. For example, in my class, the girls who played Claudette also played the police. Boal says, “Theater should be happiness, it should help us learn about ourselves and our times. We should know the world we live in, the better to change it.”

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July 6, 2010