Sheatre's David Sereda and Joan Chandler lead grade four and five Dufferin students Mackenzie Robbins, Hayden Coombs,Brianna Crawford-Reid and Reilly Misener in a workshop based on Tom Thomson. WILLY WATERTON/The Sun Times
BILL HENRY
Sun Times staff
In a Brush workshop, the children’s creative threads can lead anywhere.
The challenge for leaders David Sereda and Joan Chandler in this mixed Grade 5/6 classroom, is to seize those threads, gently pull, and inspire.
Students respond to a Tom Thomson winter scene with a word, or an idea – it’s snowing, I can see it. With coaching, the children put themselves in that scene. What would they be doing?
One imagines catching snowflakes on her tongue.
There’s another line for the new song – it’s snowing, I can taste it.
Five full school days later, this song, or maybe others inspired by Thomson’s life and work during the workshop week, might be part of a school performance. It includes dramatized tableau scenes telling aspects of the Tom Thomson legend.
Sheatre's David Sereda lead grade four and five Dufferin students Shane Russell and Wyatt McTeer in a workshop based on Tom Thomson. WILLY WATERTON/The Sun Times
But the point of the intensive week at Dufferin school in Owen Sound, focused around the Tom Thomson story, is more about process than product.
Vocal exercises and warmups, singing, team rhythm exercises, story sharing and story making, collaborative acting, writing and reacting to paintings are among creative activities teacher Wendy Kipp said bring out the best in her students.
Kipp has watched Sheatre’s Brush workshops in her classroom for seven years. They always ignite the kids’ creativity, she said. New skills and abilities she sees for the first time, along with the teamwork the sessions inspire, will inform her teaching style with this group.
“This is huge, huge, huge,” Kipp said. “I can use the strategies and the techniques and the activities all year.”
She said Brush awakens interests and imaginative and communicative skills – singing, acting, movement, writing, speaking, interpreting and expressing feelings – the students didn’t know they had.
“The kids build confidence in their own abilities,” Kipp said. “From the beginning of the week to the end of the week, they come out of their shell and do things that they may never have done in the past.”
It goes far beyond drama, involving all disciplines, all skills for students this age.
“Developing the arts, the music, the drama, the dance, the visual arts, I think is absolutely the foundation for developing their language skills, they’re reading and they’re writing and their problem solving. Without that, that’s where we end up with kids that struggle in those academic areas.”
The idea for Brush as a creative framework for school workshops flowed from a Sheatre summer community collaborative theatre program in Owen Sound. Participants used the Tom Thomson story to create songs and dramatize aspects of the legend.
Soon after, Chandler, a Wolseley area resident who was worked with drama in schools through the Ontario Arts Councils for many years, tried the Thomson story format during a five-day school artist residency.
It worked so well, that she and Sereda, a musician, singer, and songwriter who lived at Leith for eight years, immediately began honing what became the Brush workshops they lead together.
Success depends largely on the five-day intensive residency format. Weekly sessions, or half-day workshops, don’t have “the same kind of build,” Chandler said.
“The 25 hours in a run allows you to develop those skills and the connections and create something together that you can not manage over a scattered period of time. It takes a long time in the day just to get them focused enough and build the energy so they can get to the core of the work.”
Chandler and Sereda’s flexible approach relies on following those creative threads wherever the kids’ ideas lead. The plan is to present a play, or something, but the kids don’t learn pre-planned parts. They create the piece together over the five days.
The results are surprising, Chandler said.
“Yes, all the time. We never know what’s going to come out. It’s very energizing for us, and really exciting.”
“Where does it go? We don’t know,” said Sereda. “But for five days, we want to set up an environment where anything is possible and where we can all inspire one another,”
He said children this age respond to Tom Thomson’s story. The wilderness painter grew up in the area, at Leith, and despite setbacks, including a childhood illness that kept him from school, became the country’s best known artist before his mysterious death in 1917.
“He followed this passion that he had and something became of it. That really intrigues kids.”
Students Brynna Kirkwood and Marissa Crannie said they’re inspired by both the workshop and by Tom Thomson.
“It kind of makes me feel like I want to go out an look at pretty trees and paint them,” Marissa said during a break from the Dufferin Brush sessions.
The workshop partners use a guided approach, which over several days gives children enough comfort to more readily share what they think and more comfortably work together.
“It’s a big shift for them,” Chandler said. “It’s like being on a tippy canoe almost, adjusting to that and learning how to be together in a focused, playful way, and working as a team with people you’ve never worked with before.”
Learning to listen to one another and respond is essential to the process, and eventually the performance before students, staff and a few parents at the school.
“It’s about taking up whatever threads might seem insignificant,” Sereda said. “If you don’t listen to each other, things get missed and you can’t pick up that thread.”
Chandler said all the activities and exercises are designed to “spur the imagination.”
“We look at the similarities between painting, story telling and music,” Chandler said. “They all have rhythm, they all have mood, they have similar characteristics.”
“So you can use the mood that you feel when you look at a painting to drive the song that you’re creating,” Sereda added.
Student Brynna Kirkwood said she learned much about Tom Thomson, and about how different his paintings look from up close or far away. Marissa Crannie said “if you look closely at a painting, you can get a song out if it.”
During this morning session, midway through the week-long workshop, Dufferin students work in groups to portray scenes from Thomson’s life; a mishap during a fishing and canoe adventure, his search for a mammoth tree to paint in Algonquin Park, the day a forest animal devoured one of his field paintings.
“What would you call this scene,” Sereda asks.
“The animal critic,” a girl suggests.
“Who came up with that?” teacher Wendy Kipp asks, beaming at her class.
Brynna said it was “pretty easy” to imagine the scene she put together with other students, and how to play it. “I was the broken paddle.” And the students shared their ideas and worked together with no disagreement “most of the time.”
Chandler has won recent accolades for her work in theatre, including the the first-ever Phil Hartman Arts and Sheatre was given an Owen Sound Cultural Award last month for excellence in theatre. Chandler also recently won the International Film Festival Ireland for for best original screenplay.
The Tom Thomson story has inspired the work of both Sereda, who now lives in Regina, and Chandler. They collaborated on the community theatre project which became the Brush school drama and arts workshops.
Sereda and Chandler were at Hepworth school all this week,
with another Brush session for Grade 5 students there.
Brush was also a collaborative theatre piece performed at The Roxy Theatre as part of Tom Thomson days several years ago.
Some of the songs from that workshop, and others Sereda has written since then have become part of his Songs in the Key of Tom collection, which he will tour next year.
Chandler is writing the script for a proposed Christmas-themed animated television program based on aspects of the Thomson story, which could become a series of programs.
The two have also collaborated on the award-winning interactive student theatre presentation Far From The Heart, which looks at dating violence. They plan to present it next year again, at high schools across Saskatchewan.
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