The cast developed the show during residencies in elementary schools.
A girl is sad because she wants to paint but doesn’t have paints. Suddenly, an earthquake happens, and a paint set comes flying into her crumbling house. After the rubble is cleared, she has a show in a gallery.
A hungry and lonely man with no name meets a magical pink unicorn who grants a home and some companionship.
A girl trying to become a YouTube cooking star keeps getting interrupted by her younger sister, who thinks the chocolate in her cookie dough is poop — and she really wants it.
That’s just a sneak peek from Whoopensocker!, a show that is the result of an innovative arts-in-education program at Sandburg, Thoreau, Lincoln and Emerson Elementary schools.
With a whimsical name like Whoopensocker!, you might expect to see the young people acting out their poems, songs and stories. But the material is adapted and performed by some of the city’s finest actors and singers. Theatre LILA is part of a collaborative tradition called “devised theatre,” where an ensemble works together to create pieces that include song, story and movement. LILA recently finished a run of Lines, a hopeful yet heartwrenching look at race created by women of color.
Whoopensocker! is a collaboration with Erica Halverson, a fun-loving UW-Madison education professor who calls herself the “mayor of Whoopensocker City.” She shares directorial duties with LILA artistic director Jessica Lanius and teaching artists/performers Beau Johnson and Amanda Farrar. Halverson co-founded a similar program in Chicago called Barrel of Monkeys. Teaching artists work for six weeks with students in the classroom, playing games, doing improv exercises and throwing out prompts. Then they adapt the source material into a full-length performance for each school; a greatest hits show will play on Overture Center’s Rotunda Stage.
The teaching artists use lots of nonverbal exercises, which helps kids who are “emergent bilinguals,” says Halverson. “We almost always perform a piece that was not originally written in English, and some kids prefer to express themselves pictorially; we try to encourage that.”
Halverson, who teaches pre-service teachers, says her work with LILA also informs her teaching. “This work reminds me that classroom teachers ought to have the same freedoms to create as teaching artists,” she says.
Seeing adult pros perform the work is transformative and empowering for the students, says Halverson. “We take this work seriously. We don’t see it as cute or something to say ‘Oh, isn’t it precious?’ We treat it like honest source material, and kids take so much value from having professional artists take their work seriously.”
Lanius says that the process can also help children who are reluctant to write: “You have a kid who might be struggling, and you’ll work with that kid, and you can draw more out of them. Put it on stage. And even if it’s six lines, they’re saying. ‘I wrote that. I didn’t know the power I had.’”
The end-of-semester showcase performances for parents and community members are packed with supportive family and friends, says Halverson. Lanius has another goal for the project: She wants to get more diverse groups of kids and young people involved in writing and performing in the theater: “I think this is a great way to offer space and time and value for kids who aren’t going to necessarily sign up for a class.”
Actor Casem Abulughod says he studied devised theatre in grad school; he’s done three Whoopensocker residencies this year, at Thoreau, Sandburg and Lincoln. “With devised work like this, we are being given these wonderful gifts from these kids — different stories and things that come out of their heads in a pure, unfiltered manner,” says Abulughod. “We then get to turn it into something on a stage. We get to explore that. Some of them are touching, some are incredibly humorous, and some are both.”
Whoopensocker! will be performed at the Overture Center’s Rotunda Stage on June 1 (6:30 p.m.) and June 3 (noon and 3 p.m.) Admission is free.
