The Power of a Good Question
by Aaron Coates
The playwright Eugene Ionesco said, “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
In creating theatre with people of all ages—and particularly young people—I’ve found that there aren’t really recipes for success. What worked in the past may not work the next time, and what connects one group of students may leave another group uninspired. In other words, when making a piece of theatre, there are no easy answers. There are, however, some terrific questions.
So, with that, I would like to offer three questions which I have found useful to ask when working with students. Sometimes I ask them out loud, and sometimes they’re just in my head. Perhaps you’ll find one or two useful.
What if…? — I tell them that these two words are magical. And they are. They open up possibilities. They invite imagination. They spark creativity. All great stories begin with a question. “What if a young boy discovered one day that he was a wizard?” Or “What if a young girl and her dog were picked up by a tornado and dropped into a fantastical land?”
What’s the game? — We often play games to warm up before we start working, and then sometimes at the end if we finish early and want to reward ourselves. But the trick is to never stop looking for games. I’ll give you an example. At Quest, we sometimes use stories as a place to begin creating. I remember being assigned Chester by Melanie Watt for a class of grade 1s I would be working with. I read it by myself and thought, “this is hilarious! And I have no idea how to make this into a play.” If you’re unfamiliar with the book, it’s about a cat that keeps messing up a simple story that the author, Melanie Watt, is trying to write and illustrate. A funny premise. But the problem, it seemed to me, was that nothing actually happened in the story! The cat just kept on interrupting and derailing everything. I met the kids in their classroom and read it out loud, still having no idea whatsoever about how we would approach it. Stalled out, I decided we would play a game that I found young kids often like. I call it the Opposite Game. They start by mirroring me and then once they’ve got that down, I ask them to do the opposite of what I do. If I put my hands on my head, they touch their feet, etc. It always makes kids giggle. And then, at some point, during the game I had a eureka moment. This was what we would do! So we created a story where I would come out and tell the audience that we were going to present the play of Chester. But then the students start disobeying and derailing the story. My character would get more irate and they would provoke me even more. The audience loved it. But more importantly, the kids loved performing it. And a large part of that was because we got to play the game of opposites/disobeying every time they performed it. It always felt alive.
If this was the Broadway version and money and resources were no object, what would you do? — I think this is better than the imperative “Think Big”. When I work students of all ages, I often hear some version of “Well, I’d like to do this, but I don’t have _____” or “I need money to _____.” And yet, it is amazing how many things become possible, if we just don’t rule them out right away. Don’t have a set? Use your bodies to create the space. Don’t have costumes? Make your characters vocally and physically expressive. Don’t have a giant ball of fire? Play an explosion and flash the lights. A set doesn’t automatically make a play interesting to look at. Costumes don’t necessarily make characters watchable. And special effects are wonderful, but sometimes the best effects happen in the audience’s imagination. The great filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, who made his first pre-digital film for a minuscule $7000 said, “Creativity, not money, is used to solve problems.”
Happy questioning!