The Dragon Speaks

By Anna Kemp

For the last few years, I have been running theatre workshops for kids in the Alpujarra mountains in the south of Spain. I moved to a village there with my husband and our three young kids in 2006, in search of clean air and a slower pace of life – which we found in abundance.

There is a wonderful 1950’s feel to life in our village. Kids play in the street or potter up and down on their bikes. They help their families pick almonds and know all about hunting. But the village is off the beaten track and educational and cultural resources are, well, few and far between. There is a newly-built school – but teachers are sent – rather than choose to come - to this far flung place and if you want your kids to experience something beyond the standard school day (be it an after school activity or a theatre workshop), you have to be prepared to do it yourself. This may seem bleak in comparison to the dizzy array of activities on offer to kids in urban settings. However, it just means that kids tend to do any – and every – activity going.

Now, you might think – given the circumstances - that people would jump at the chance to sign their kids up for a drama group. But, parents in the village are a pragmatic lot. They are either keen to catapult their children to a better future (and believe the way to do that is to push tangible skills like reading and learning English) or they believe the land (or the construction industry) will provide a future for their kids. Schooling is not a priority with this second lot, and their kids often end up leaving school with only a basic education. Either way, there is a tendency to undervalue more creative activities, and, as I quickly found out, neither group was in any great rush to leap on the ‘theatre’ bandwagon.

So our first workshop was cobbled together. There is a sprinkling of foreign families living in the area, and it was to these I turned to get the group off the ground. I begged and borrowed our friends’ kids, enticed my own three-year-old daughter up onto the stage with her brother and sister, and was thankful for the three Spanish kids who genuinely signed up. I roped in a Spanish friend of mine to help and we got to work on adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. The play we ended up with was perhaps not what people expected. None of the children had any lines and we told the story essentially as Maurice Sendak tells it: visually. We used evocative music as a backdrop to the action, a minimum of props and very basic costumes. But it worked. Come September, twenty one kids signed up. Our group had doubled.

Three years down the line, it is funny to think back on our struggles at the beginning. Now, our workshops are firmly established in the area. We can be quietly confident that kids will sign up. The mayor’s office even got a grant recently to get some stage lighting. But that first workshop taught me an invaluable lesson. It made me see that sometimes you have to ‘do’ first. That people will sign up for activities they might not have considered before, if you show them the way. We’d obviously all prefer a project to be an instant, overnight success. But if it isn’t one, it doesn’t mean it won’t be. One day.

Anyone interested in reading more about my experiences running theatre workshops for kids can check out my new blog: http://eldragonhabla.blogspot.com