North Lawndale, or “Teamwork makes the Dream Work!”
Posted by Bryan on May 15, 2015
Hi, internet! This is your good friend Bryan letting you know all is well—nay, FANTASTIC—with the North Lawndale school show adapting process. And I’ll have you know that it’s especially thrilling for me to be in on this collection of stories, having been one of the teachers at one of the school involved. Yes, having just finished our in-the-classroom workshop residency at Chalmers School of Excellence, Monkey Courtney and I are lucky in that we get to jump right into the making of our students’ freshly-writ stories into plays.
In fact, this school show is unique in that it teams-up four amazing schools, all in the North Lawndale area and each with their own residencies, into one big show. Chalmers School of Excellence, Dvorak School of Excellence, Herzl School of Excellence, and Johnson School of Excellence are all on the roster of this Avengers-level superhero troop, and I’m glad I get to be a part of this display of community.
Here’s a moment in rehearsal where monkeys Ashley, Elisa, Evie, and Geoff are a group of friends jamming out to their boombox, but I feel like they could easily be a quartet of supe’s warming up to battle some evil foe.
**Note to self: Explore a writing activity where we act out a story from a picture (a la Picture Day), take a snapshot of the acting, then write a totally new story based off of the snapshot. Lather, Rinse, Repeat until infinity!
Now that I think of it, the world could use a superhero team like that, with the energy, talent and creativity of all of our student writers, to overcome a fearsome cataclysmic event like the one depicted in one of our stories we’ll perform in the show, which I leave you with now:
The Ancient Attack
by Justin S., Johnson School of Excellence
Day 13 12:30pm April 15th. One night a war started. The dead dinosaurs came back alive. Every civilan in U.S.A. moved to other places. Cops soldiers and vehicles blocked the bridges to U.S.A.
Day 40 9:50am December 4093. Dead bodies and dead dinosaurs were everywhere
Eagle Wing 3: I just found 10 pterodactyls
Eagle Wing 2: Captain I’m going down. A dinosaur is inside my osprey!
Warthog 6: Our vehicles are destroyed but they have now turned into barriers when the T Rex stepped on them. Oh no we’re under attack run run run!!!To be continued