EUPHORIA

by Juanita Castro-Ochoa

 One of the hardest things for me as a drama teacher is the moment that we're about to put up a show and we started looking for what we wanna do with our students. It's very difficult for me to find material that they can connect with, that speaks about them and is for them, that contains subject matter that deals with their issues, with who they are, where they come from, what they want.

I love to give them the freedom and liberty to choose what they wanna work on, especially when it's something they write themselves. This year, for the multicultural show at the Urban Assembly Academy of Government and Law, they asked us to write something about culture. I didn't want to impose on them what “culture” means to me. I really wanted to hear from them what culture means to them.

They all came up with the idea of doing a scene from the TV show Euphoria.

When I asked how we would justify to everybody that this is a cultural piece, they responded exactly how I hoped they would respond: “This is our culture. This is what's happening in our lives.”

They took the iconic fight scene from Euphoria during the play [“wait….is this play about us?!?!”] and they made it their own. They added, they added elements that were honest to their stories, to the things that had happened during their school year, including a fight that happened a long time ago where somebody actually snatched somebody’s wig off!

The food had to be McDonald's because there's a McDonald's next to their school, and they wanted to be as authentic as they can.

So they wrote it, they acted, they directed, they did everything. For me, it's just a beautiful experience, as a teacher, not be the one leading, but actually be the one supporting: helping them shape their own ideas, not them shaping my idea. And we did it beautifully for the multicultural show. So beautifully in fact, that a security guard interrupted the scene in the middle, because he thought the fight was real! We also got the chance to perform it at the art share at Lincoln Center - without interruption this time.

As the final project, I wanted them to have something they could take with them forever and be really proud of what they did. With support from my team at BAE, we filmed it. The most important lesson through it all was the students getting to see how an idea, an improv, can incubate into something they can cherish the rest of their lives.