Acting with children

This will probably be a more than one part because it's about theatre and as yOU KNOW I can't ever keep myself short on this.

It will soon be one year since I last went to my job as a drama instructor, naively thinking I will return in September (before they fired me).

On the other hand, I'm only three weeks from seeing my babies (characters) getting shown to the world. My play, my sweet main character and her friends, the complexity of friendship in a small town, the madness creeping in, and the past haunting them. Aaaah it's soo good!!

But yeah, I'll talk about that later. Now I want to talk about memories from the final years of my drama instructor work. Because I was thinking about it the other day.

Even if I favoured working with the teenagers did the children have their charm too. And we had more warm ups with them than with the older ones, and I liked doing the warm ups. One of my favourite was a wheel of items, where you deliver your line (or item) with some theme.

My favourite was zombie or troll. I could walk in the circle delivering the line "spaghetti" but as a zombie. It was so fun. I was actually good at doing that as a zombie or troll, as for many other themes. My least favourite was doing it as a witch. My co-worker was soo good at doing the witch voice, and I wasn't as good. I got actually performace pressure from the witch, as I was "supposed" to be as skilled as my co-worker and I sucked at doing a witch voice. Well, I nailed the zombie one ten out of ten at all times.

The best thing with the children? Sometimes their humour. But I got so frustrated with their humour for most of the time, because it was... well, childish!

I remember now something I did the first year I was working there, in 2014. I had quite some impurities on my forehead during that time, and I remember a kid (one of the most annoying kids I've ever met, and I've met quite some annoying kids) pointing straight at my forehead, almost touching my skin, saying: "You've got pimples".

I was so baffled at the fact that this fucking child points at my skin saying so. Without saying a word I grabbed her wrist and squeezed so hard I could. I stared her in the eyes with a glance that could murder someone as I squeezed her wrist. All this without words. Finally she yanked her wrist out of my grasp.

That one incident made me realize that I'm not good with children. I got better as the years went by. I didn't snap at them as easily, and learned when to just shup up so I wouldn't hurt anyone. I believe my co-worker knew this, so she handled all the children for me. My work was so play with them and give them help and feedback. The discipline part was handled by my co-worker.

So no, the children wasn't my cup of tea. The teenagers tho, aaah, I loved them!

Next part will be about Acting with teenagers!