Discomfort is a powerful teacher for theater and improv students at Denver’s Vista Academy.
The middle and high schoolers, after all, are deep into a stage of life that many bumble, stumble and fumble their way through. So when asked to stand and perform on the spot, they sometimes laugh to distract themselves and their peers from their jitters.
“It’s OK,” facilitator Michael Board II tells his high school students as they loosen up at the start of class, each rolling their necks and swinging their hips around while standing together in a circle. “Be silly. It’s all right. Come on. If I can do it, you can do it, too.”
Other times the nerves fall away, revealing a kind of confidence and poise well beyond a student’s years.
And then come the moments when the discomfort takes a sobering turn, like the first day they met one student who, in the midst of a game, shared that his brother died last year.
The theater classes, developed by Arvada nonprofit Mirror Image Arts, help students learn more about themselves and navigate the trauma of their past as well as gain skills to light the way toward a brighter future. The nonprofit organization works with about 1,000 teens each year in high-poverty schools, detention centers, facility schools and after-school programs, helping them understand what it means to build a relationship with an adult they can trust and find a lasting sense of belonging.
High school students conclude a theater and improvisation class Nov. 9, 2023, at Vista Academy in Denver. Arvada nonprofit Mirror Image Arts works with students in schools and detention centers to promote social-emotional skills. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
“We create spaces where every single person feels valued, seen and heard,” said Maya Osterman-Van Grack, executive director of programs for Mirror Image Arts. “Theater is the most magical art form to do that because it takes a community to make theater. Even if you’re doing a one-person show, there’s a director. There might be a lighting designer. There’s a tech person. You need humans to make theater. At its core, theater is the study of humanity and is about storytelling and making meaning.”
While forging a community with their classmates and stretching their creativity to perform on the spot, students learn social-emotional skills that have only become more critical after the pandemic isolated them and made it harder for many to readjust to learning in person upon returning to classes. They find out more about who they are and how to manage their emotions. They form relationships with teachers and peers and figure out how to be effective with their social skills. And they start to grasp what it takes to make responsible decisions.
In other words, Board says, they’re learning “human skills.”
High school students reflect in journals following a theater and improvisation class Nov. 9, 2023, at Vista Academy in Denver. Arvada nonprofit Mirror Image Arts works with students in schools and detention centers to promote social-emotional skills. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
The teachers nurture those skills in students through a style of theater known as “theatre of the oppressed,” which Osterman-Van Grack describes as the idea that everyone is an expert of their own lives and is an actor every day, constantly improvising. Theater, therefore, can be a platform for people to make meaning of their lives.
A big part of that approach focuses class attention on students’ experiences throughout the process of learning instead of forcing them to obsess over the final outcome. So, unlike many of the students’ other classes, their time in improv and theater is not spent cramming for a test, writing a research paper or even rehearsing lines to take center stage.
Lockers and college flags are seen in a hallway Nov. 9, 2023, at Vista Academy in Denver. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
That might mean that a scene or a play they’re practicing culminates with a conflict rather than solves it, Osterman-Van Grack said.
“So it isn’t about a perfect happy ending,” she said. “But it’s about, yep, we’re humans. We’re going to get in conflict. We’re going to make mistakes.”
The students, she added, can experiment with that conflict, stepping into different characters and testing different ways of how they would respond and confront the strife — often following storylines that mirror their own lives.
Being treated like a human being for the first time
For more than one student at Vista Academy, the theater classes have helped soften their anger and give them skills to better control their fiery emotions, Board said.
Each day, the educators pose a reflection question that pushes students to think deeply beneath the surface of their feelings. One particular reflection question asked the class, what is one thing that you would change about your life that would significantly change the direction that you’re going?
The ability to get a handle on their anger was one response, Board said. The lesson that followed taught students about the autonomy they carry over their choices.
“This is something that lives in you all the time, so you do have control over it,” he told students, “because you have the choice to be angry at anything. You also have the choice to be reflective. You also have the choice to be happy. You can’t necessarily control everything that happens in your life, the circumstances, but you can control your reaction to it.”
Vista Academy senior Jada Spiller, 17, is among the students who have learned how to tame aggression through the theater and improv class.
“Expressing myself more calmly and just learning how to be myself around people” has helped her grow within the class, she said, along with making her more open-minded and helping her realize, “I create my own world.”
Part of that discovery comes with imagination, a skill that challenged middle and high schoolers to step outside their shell during a recent class by improvising a commercial to sell a random classroom object — a highlighter and a globe, for example.
And by learning in a classroom with adults students know they can trust, like Board and Terrence Moore, 24, who helps run improv scenes and check in with students, particularly on their bad days.
Moore came to Mirror Image Arts as a teen and is now working for the nonprofit after gaining the sympathy, empathy and other social-emotional skills his students have started building. He said that he didn’t meet an adult he could trust until Osterman-Van Grack.
Program coordinator Michael Board II, center, leads exercises during a high school theater and improvisation class Nov. 9, 2023, at Vista Academy in Denver. Arvada nonprofit Mirror Image Arts works with students in schools and detention centers to promote social-emotional skills. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
Moore remembers being hesitant when he first joined a group of students within Mirror Image Arts. It took a good six months for him to embrace theater and improv, but he kept returning to the class because Osterman-Van Grack’s spirit “uplifted” his own.
And through theater, he has learned lessons that have become a kind of compass for him.
“It’s OK to not be OK, and it’s OK to fail,” Moore said, “because I feel like nowadays everybody feels like if you fail it’s the end of the world for some reason. It’s not always like that. It took me awhile to learn that. It’s not always the end of the world. It’s sometimes literally a trip-up, and you can pick yourself right back up and go on to do what you’ve got to do.”
He’s matured into the kind of trusted adult he needed as a kid, often walking around school with students and listening to them as they open up about whatever is weighing on them that day.
Moore said he tries to reassure them while also acknowledging that “everything’s not going to be OK all the time.”
Maya Osterman-Van Grack, Jada Spiller, and Michael Board II complete tame-bonding exercises during a high school theater and improvisation class Nov. 9, 2023, at Vista Academy in Denver. Arvada nonprofit Mirror Image Arts works with students in schools and detention centers to promote social-emotional skills. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
“You can come inside this room however you want to,” he tells students. “We’re not going to tell you, ‘This is how you should show up.’ You can come in this room however you want to. If you’re not feeling it, you’re not feeling it. If you’re going through life, you’re going through life.”
Board follows the same approach. The role of a trusted adult begins with letting students steer the direction of the class and “listening and leaving space for them to be able to tell their own story,” he said.
“Their story is important,” Board said, “and I feel like a lot of adults in the everyday child’s life doesn’t have or doesn’t give that space to let them speak openly and freely about what it is that they’re experiencing in their life. I think often in just the society that we live in we discount the opinions and thoughts of children, and the biggest part of being a trusted adult is leaving space for them to share their thoughts and their opinions and for us to listen.”
That’s equally important in school settings and in detention centers, where nonprofit staff work with kids who Osterman-Van Grack said are automatically labeled “a criminal, a monster, a deviant.”
“They’re metabolizing all of that language,” she said. “Every experience that they are having that is telling them they are less than sticks with them, and so to then come in and say … we’re all actors, so we’re all the same. You get to leave all that behind because right now for this hour-and-a-half we are actors together in an ensemble.”
A common refrain she hears from students who are incarcerated: “This is the first time I was treated like a human.”
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