For many, the most memorable high school theatre experiences are being involved in the elaborate process of staging of a full-scale popular Broadway musical.
As fun as these can be, once in a while projects come along that challenge students in another direction – the act of creating, and taking ownership of, an original theatre work.
Such a piece was showcased March 6 and 7 at Oceana PARC Playhouse where Southridge Senior School Theatre Company presented The Yellow Suitcase and Other Migration Stories, a collective, devised theatre work involving a total of 22 students in Grades 10, 11 and 12, plus backstage crew members from Grades 8 and 9.
As theatre teacher, team lead and producer Sara MacGregor, and fellow theatre teacher and facilitator Jen Sneller noted – during a break in readying the production for its opening night – the play was entirely conceived and created as a group effort, without specific writers or directors.
They explained such work is a natural extension of the Harkness Learning philosophy – a discussion-based, student-centred, collaborative learning process – which the senior school embraces for all subjects, ranging from mathematics to languages.
First half of the evening was a collection of migration-themed stories told in a variety of theatrical performance genres – including Canadian Origin video pieces by individual students, original scenes and dramatic and song excerpts from existing plays and musicals, and dance pieces, including a traditional Punjabi Bhangra dance combo.
The second half was devoted to The Yellow Suitcase itself. The story of Ania, a Polish woman who came to Canada fleeing war-torn Europe, it traced her experiences from the 1940s through the 1980s as she related her story to her grown daughters.
The student-devised narrative included her interactions with her sisters in Poland, her marriage to a Canadian husband, Paul, and, as she grows older, her relationship with her two daughters June and Cynthia.
Three students played the leading character – Amelia Nanji as the younger Ania, Lauryn Gill as Ania in her middle years and Annika Chamorro as Ania in her older years.
The play also featured Aleksandra Dolecki as Basia, Ania's Polish-Canadian friend, Brody Hart as Paul, Lucy Shorrock as June and Keeley Davies as Cynthia, with Shubham Sharma, a talented multi-instrumentalist, as the busker/musician who helped weave the parts of the story together.
Also featured as ensemble players evoking the different situations and eras were Olivia Shipman, Nikil Siran, Jaxon Johal, Siren Lu, Quinn Heslip, Rachel Yang Jillian Hodson, Adam Woodhead and Harvey Liu.
As MacGregor and Sneller, and drama stewards Shorrock and Yang explained, the creative journey of the play began when MacGregor noticed a number of pieces of vintage luggage that had been donated to the school's theatre program.
Another inspirational piece was provided when 2008 Southridge alumnus Aquil Virani returned to the school, commissioned to to create a collaborative art piece for the 25th anniversary of Southridge. Several years later MacGregor noted that Virani had become artist in residence at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia – and had created a an exhibit Our Immigrant Stories that brought together the experiences of 100 immigrants.
"Then I saw a murmuration of starlings preparing to migrate and thought perhaps that the idea of migration could be what could bring together all the suitcases we have," MacGregor said.
But the next stages of development were in the hands of the students, she and Snelling said.
"We wanted it to be everybody's play," Sneller commented.
"It makes the show more special to us," Shorrock said. "It's more of a challenge, but at the same time it's fun to have more freedom in what we can do in a show. It was completely different from having a director to tell us to do this or do that."
Improvisations around objects, including the suitcases, character studies and reading of the stories collected by Virani, and personal family immigration stories, slowly created a fusion of ideas, she added.
"We created a bunch of different themes and ideas and kind of squished them in together," she said.
It wasn't simply a sugar-coated version of the immigrant experience, they said – and as the show program indicated the students weren't shying away from tackling themes of racism, and depictions of death.
While the show evolved into a specific storyline, there was a growing sense that some of the themes were universal, Shorrock and Yang said.
"There are definitely similarities, but at the same time, everyone's story is different," Shorrock said.
"Even though everyone has a different background, there is the same feeling of nervousness, anticipation and emotionalism about being an immigrant," Yang said.
"And we came up with a bigger theme: 'In new surroundings, those who receive kindness are more likely to pass it on,'" she added.
What was the significance of the yellow suitcase of the title?
"That was everything that Ania brought with her to her new country – a lot of memories and objects that were special to her and represented her life," said Yang.
Even the two performances of the show acknowledged a work-in-progress, the creators noted.
"For this show we are giving the audience a chance to give us appropriate, quality feedback," MacGregor said.
That feedback will be helpful when The Yellow Suitcase is reprised this spring – it has been selected to be featured at the Theatrical Arts Educators Association festival in Vancouver at the end of April.
