KNOW A MONKEY: Halena Kays
Posted by Alexis on September 8, 2010
This month’s Know a Monkey blog entry sends us in the way-back machine for a little Monkey history with one of the group’s co-founders, Halena Kays.
Where do you live?
Right now, I live in Austin, Texas during the school year because I’m in grad school down there, but I lived in Chicago for 15 years before I left.
How are you involved with Barrel of Monkeys?
Well, I was Artistic Director for eleven years, and I am one of the two co-founders. I started it with Erica Rosenfeld - now Erica Halverson—who graduated from Northwestern with me. It was just the two of us when we were 22 years old.
What inspired you two to start Barrel of Monkeys?
We had really strong educational and political goals from the get-go. Erica and I had a lot of community activism in us, and we’re both big believers in the public school system, so we thought about how we could take the thing that brought us the most happiness at Northwestern, (which was working with Griffin’s Tale), and our spirit of wanting to work with underprivileged kids and to get into the pubic school system. We had to figure out how to combine those, which is where the educational side of this comes, and happily Erica decided to get her PhD in education. We teamed up so she was working on the curriculum side and I was working on the artistic side.
Did you like writing as a kid?
Actually as a kid at some point I figured out I really couldn’t spell very well, and I learned a lot of ways then to avoid getting busted for it. So I just kind of didn’t write very much for a lot of years, cause I didn’t want to get called out for being stupid because I couldn’t spell because otherwise I was a pretty smart kid. I look back at that and wish that someone had shown up to be like, “It doesn’t matter —spell however you want.” Fundamentally in my life now it really doesn’t matter, because of technology, that I can’t spell. But it wasn’t until high school that an English teacher, my senior year, said, you know, “You’re really great at writing, and you really love literature, so I’m just not going to grade your spelling tests anymore, because spelling is not a sign of intelligence.” I wish someone would have told me that in third grade.
What was Barrel of Monkeys like back when you first started it?
We sort of gathered a small band of people that we were in school with at first, and just sort of started it that way. We spent our own money, and everything was done for free. We rehearsed in crazy places like the back of coffee shops, wherever we could be for free. Originally we started just working with Cambodian refugee kids in their after school program.
What school were you working in?
It wasn’t a school—it was like in someone’s apartment that served as a place for the kids to go after school that was safe. We would help them with their homework, and then they’d let us teach them writing if they had time. Over the course of a long time we gathered stories from these kids. And then—it was crazy—we made a show and we brought them all to a basement of a church and we did the show. It was like really sketchy—not even really a show. And then these kids’ 3rd grade teacher heard about us, and brought us into her classroom and that was our first public classroom.
Did you ever envision Barrel of Monkeys becoming what it is today?
Well, at first it was fun and crazy and it just grew from that. Eventually we brought more people in and created more curriculum and made relationships with schools. Our goal was to build it, and I think my goal was like, “some day this could be my job.” But really I was working a million other jobs trying to be an actor and doing all that stuff. But [Barrel of Monkeys] was always our priority. It took a while to get it to a place when we knew it was going to survive.
How big was your first cast?
Probably like eight or nine people. We’re close to probably 40 cast members now.
You said earlier that you really believe in the public school system. Why is that?
I think its one of the most important institutions in our culture: free education, not for profit, but run by the city and the community that you live in. I feel like a lot of things are turning for-profit because people feel like it’s a more efficient way, but I think that things like schools shouldn’t be about profit. It should just be about the public wanting to educate their kids. It’s a super challenging thing to do in a big city, but I always think that if people in the community were willing to take some time with whatever talent they have and offer it, then that would help, in the tiniest way.
Do you think Barrel of Monkeys is helping?
I don’t pretend that we change the system, but if in every class one kid remembers something about us and what they thought about the program, and adjusted something about what they thought about themselves as a writer or a student or a person in the world, over ten years that’s a lot of good. We know it’s a gift to us to get to do this, and I think our egos are really in check about it, and I think it’s really actually self-serving, because it’s a joy to do. But there is a thing in there where we know that whatever small difference we can make at a moment when a kid is starting to identify who they are and what they’re good at, if we are there to be like, you are an artist, you are a writer, no matter what language you speak, no matter whether you have a learning disability or you think you stink at English because you’re a bad speller —which I was a kid— your stories are interesting to us and your expression is amazing to us. And we have such a diverse company that, in any classroom if there’s four of us we can give them a lot of different people they can look to and realize they have a lot of options about who they can be in the world.
Why do you think Barrel of Monkeys “works”?
Well first, we’re four people in the classroom, not one teacher. One teacher is really limited, especially because the classrooms are overfilled so you can have 35 kids with one teacher and if those kids are in an underserved area they might be coming from a lot of tough stuff already, and so that teacher can’t do what we can do. If there’s four of us and we notice that one kid is really suffering in a classroom, we’ll talk at a meeting and I’ll say, “You know what? I’m just going to hang out near that kid all the time and keep an eye on him, and get him to write cause he hasn’t written yet.” We have that freedom because there’s four of us, and it can really make a huge difference. And then if that kid writes something awesome and we put that in the show the other kids in his class will look at him differently after that and start to treat him better.
Do you often see that - where kids treat each other differently?
Yes. We actually have teachers that ask us to come in at the beginning of the first semester because they want to set up a society in their class that is like what we encourage. We have these rules, like “every idea is a good idea” and “no making fun of anyone’s ideas.” We share that with fun and silliness and we always try to look stupid and lower our status a lot so that they feel free to make a mistake or look stupid. It really changes the way the classroom treats each other and they way they look at someone who maybe has a learning disability and always “stinks” at school. If we think they’re really amazing cause their imagination is really cool, the other kids start to think that too.
If you come back to Chicago after grad school, will you still be involved with Barrel of Monkeys?
I still have one more year of grad school—so then I’ll be a Master!—but if we come back I’m sure we’ll be involved in the Monkeys somehow. I would love to be like the Benevolent Founder, who’s there to have fun and help whenever anyone needs it, but I feel really great about letting go of running it.