Teaching Theatre Journal
In the same boat
Fishing for stories, from Alaska to Maine—and finding community along the way
It was just a little skiff—seven- or eight-foot, battered and abandoned, left floating on an inlet off the Gulf of Alaska. A fisherman spotted the stray, tied it to his own boat, and brought it home as a gift to his eldest. For eleven-year-old Nora Marks, the proud daughter of a Tlingit clan struggling within the white-dominated culture of the 1930s, that boat was a life raft.
Out on the water, Nora could be her own captain. She could fish as her ancestors had and help feed her family. And unlike Nora’s schoolteachers, that old skiff never humiliated or punished her for failing to speak English.
“It made her feel really happy,” said Savannah Strang, a Juneau fifth-grader who portrayed Nora Marks Dauenhauer in a recent performance titled Dear Fish. “It made her forget about what happened in school.”
Strang was one of more than two hundred student participants in “Maine to Alaska: Swapping Fish Tales,” an arts-integrated learning project launched in 2009 by the John F. Kennedy Center’s Partners in Education. It began when elementary school students from Juneau, Alaska, and Deer Isle, Maine, interviewed a couple dozen fishermen in their respective communities. Then theatre director Ryan Conarro and playwright Dave Hunsaker (both professionals based in Juneau), and teams of teachers at four schools (elementary and high school, Alaska and Maine), helped larger groups of students on both coasts bring those stories to life on stage—with music, dance, documentary photography and video projections, and super-sized salmon and lobster puppets representing the profound effects the earth’s marine species and homo sapiens have had on one another.
“It was a big project of interviewing a lot of fishermen,” summed up Yanni Giamakidis, one of Strang’s classmates at Glacier Valley Elementary and a member of the Dear Fish ensemble. “We needed to tell it in a big way.”
Performed this past April at Deer Isle-Stonington Elementary School, by the Maine students, and again in May at Thunder Mountain High School in Juneau, by their Alaskan counterparts, Dear Fish cast lines of connection across the continent, across grade levels and subject areas, across communities and generations.
“It helped our schools connect local issues to a more global perspective through the arts and technology,” wrote Lorrie Heagy, a music teacher and librarian at Glacier Valley Elementary who helped steer the project. “Students learned that even though they live on different coasts, they face similar issues, struggles, and celebrations and were able to personally express their learning of geography, science, and language arts through drama, music, and the visual arts.”
True to life
Savannah Strang and her fellow performers described the experience in more personal terms.
“She was my age when she got her first boat,” Strang said of Dauenhauer, now a respected Tlingit elder and historian—and a friend to Strang’s own Tlingit-descended fishing family, though Savannah hadn’t spoken with Nora until she dropped in on a Dear Fish rehearsal. “I was excited to play her part.”
Thunder Mountain tenth-grader Marie Petersen, who portrayed Juneau fisherwoman Bonny Millard in the piece, said any real-life role carries an added weight of responsibility for the actor: “There’s a lot of pressure to get it right.” In this case, Petersen knew Millard and her family.
“It was just an honor to be able to play her,” Petersen said. “Her story is of a very strong, independent woman—I admire her a lot.”
Millard’s recollection of losing her husband in the frigid Alaska waters made for an emotional high point in Dear Fish, but, Petersen said, “she was not crying when she told her story.” So Petersen told it the same way on stage—quietly, firmly, and without tears: “That was a very bad day.”
Between tales of childhood jubilation and adult loss came the more mundane aspects of the fishing life, many of them set to familiar tunes, like this one: “Owe, owe, owe the bank/Money for your boat/Heavily heavily heavily heavily/Hope you stay afloat.” Dear Fish also traced the shifting economic, political, cultural, and environmental tides (another song asked, “Where have all the herring gone?”) that have forced contemporary fishermen in most places to adapt or get out of the business. And yet we all rely on their (sustainable) success. As an opening “Pen Pal” sequence in Dear Fish pointed out, to some groans from the audience, “We’re kind of in the same boat.”
“The fact that two communities were involved, not just one—I thought that was really cool, that we were able to collaborate,” Petersen said. “It shows how similar the experiences were. They have the same struggles.”
E-mail, digital photo-sharing, and videoconferencing helped the Maine and Alaska students and teachers feel part of the same crew. What if the two groups of fishermen had that opportunity, to work together for real?
“I think they would butt heads, because they’re all captains,” Petersen said with a wry smile. “Everybody has their own way of doing things. But I’m sure they’d talk and share stories.”
Lessons learned
Here are some written comments from community members who attended the Juneau performance of Dear Fish:
“I am an Alaska fisherman. It made me feel good to be recognized.”
“It was great to have older and younger kids collaborating.”
“The diversity of cultures, ages, and abilities brings tears to my eyes.”
The feedback in Maine was much the same. So why don’t projects like this happen more often?
Well, there’s the cost. In addition to the Kennedy Center’s initial support, it took funds from multiple state and regional arts councils, school districts, The Nature Conservancy and other nonprofit organizations, private foundations, and individuals—roughly $60,000 over two years—to make Dear Fish a reality. Many theatre technicians, designers, musicians, and other professionals donated their services, in full or in part. The producers had to be as creative as the students—and that’s sure to be the case with any similar effort, in the current budget climate. Darrell Ayers, the Kennedy Center’s Vice President for Education, said a bad economy is a good reason for schools and organizations to pool their resources and try to achieve something big, together: “We can’t be timid in times like these.” An even greater hurdle than money might be the very thing that made the interdisciplinary, intermural Dear Fish such a powerful teaching tool: it defied category and disrupted standard operating procedures.
“A lot of schools, especially high schools, tend to be departmentalized,” Conarro said. That structure, along with the continuing emphasis on standardized testing, makes it hard for teachers to cross subject boundaries and work together on a lengthy, large-scale effort. “And then getting different schools to collaborate, even within their districts... You depend entirely on the teachers,” Conarro said, “their willingness to say yes and to keep saying yes as the project unfolds.”
The teachers in Juneau said “yes”—but with some reservations, recalled Annie Calkins of the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council, a producer of Dear Fish.
“One of the biggest challenges was that when we started, the teachers did not have a clear idea of what the final product was going to be, so that in year one, there was a lot of frustration. They wanted something definitive—a specific thing we wanted their kids to be able to do,” Calkins explained. “It was very hard for them to think about themselves and their own creative development as evolving as the project went on. They’d say, ‘I’m a fourth-grade teacher, and I need to teach ecosystems, so whatever you do with me, it has to do with teaching ecosystems.’
“By the end,” Calkins said, “we heard at least some of the teachers say, ‘Okay, I get it. It was organic. We were making it as we went along.’ I know they felt the same on the Maine end.”
Another hard lesson? Two years was too much time—and not nearly enough.
When the idea for what became Dear Fish first was raised, at an annual Partners in Education meeting in Washington, D.C., Calkins and her cohorts figured a two-year span would help overburdened teachers fit things in between all their other instructional requirements. True. But sustaining the project’s energy and focus over that period proved difficult.
Halfway through, the principal of Thunder Mountain High School, a champion of the Dear Fish project, was replaced by another administrator who was less enthusiastic. “Turns out he was supportive,” Calkins said, “but he didn’t come to see the play.” Over those two long years, meanwhile, Conarro, as a jobbed-in teaching artist, had to pack his own work with the students into a few short bursts.
“The big thing I would do is invest more time in each step,” the director said. “I wish the students had had more time to prepare for the interviews. That process of asking critical questions is so important.” (Conarro, experienced in documentary theatre and radio, spent time at both sites to coach the students in formulating questions, drawing out their subjects, letting them talk, and identifying “statue moments”—those slices of life in which “actions, images, and feelings” come together, Conarro explained. “Moments we could show with our bodies.”)
Nor did the Alaska and Maine teachers have the opportunities to meet that Calkins hoped they would; last winter’s severe snow storms prevented one planned gathering at the Kennedy Center, and the high cost of travel to and from Juneau meant that only a few of the teachers and artists involved were able to see the production at both sites. “They didn’t form the personal relationships that we thought would drive the project,” Calkins said.
Hooked
Friendships did form in Juneau, Calkins said, between the elementary and high school teachers who had, up to now, lived in separate worlds.
“We had all our meetings outside the school day. We’d meet at the pub or someplace in town,” she said. “People genuinely enjoyed each other and working together.”
The students, too, reached out and learned from each other.
“My kids looked up to the high school students,” said Kim Frangos, who teaches fourth grade at Glacier Valley—and the teen-agers helped the younger students, including those with learning disabilities or other special needs, perform with confidence.
“I had kids who, at the beginning of the year, were too afraid to introduce themselves to the class,” Frangos said. “To see them now—they’re all asking me, ‘When do we get to do the next play?’ ”
Levi Smith, one of those stagestruck Glacier Valley fourth-graders, said he hoped the real fisherman of Juneau and Deer Isle felt honored by the Dear Fish performance.
“I would be sort of happy,” Smith said, imagining the satisfaction of “telling everybody how you lived your life, if you’ve never been paid attention to.”
Actor Ryan Hicks, a tenth-grader at Thunder Mountain and “a lifelong fisherman” from a commercial fishing family, said the Dear Fish interviews might easily have been turned into a book, a photo exhibit, or some other storytelling form.
“But a play—it makes it more filled with life,” Hicks said. “It makes you feel more connected.”