The Show Goes On

            On Friday evening, I packed a bag and climbed into a car with seven teenagers headed for the North Coast. The drama team was off on a new adventure – a weekend retreat at our pastor’s vacation home. Understandably, the kids were very excited. We spent two days doing theatre in various forms: improvisation, scene work, playwrighting, movement exercises, and team-building. The universal favourite was improv, as most of the kids absolutely love the show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” And their favourite improv game was Party Quirks. One person is the party host, and three others are guests at the party. Each of the guests is assigned a quirk (unknown to the host) which the host must then guess. Some of the quirks we came up with were: homeless person, James Bond, afraid of feet, and The Ghost of Christmas Past. It was a great outlet for their wacky creativity.

            During the weekend, the kids had a lot of time to just hang out together and we got to know each other even better. For example, we learned that one of the girls is especially prone to spilling her drink, that one of the guys likes to stay awake all night, and that another one of the guys eats everything in sight constantly – even when he has a loose tooth.

            We also spent a good deal of time beginning to develop ideas for a one-act play. We’ll start writing a one-act together, and will perform it at some point later in the year. After about an hour of brainstorming, we settled on the idea of modernizing the Bible. So be looking for the adventures of the punk-rock band JC and the Apostles (yes, that’d be Jesus), coming to a blog post – and maybe even a theatre – near you.

 

Word of the Week: Scundered. It roughly translates to “in trouble.” If I hadn’t used a Bible study based on the movie Finding Nemo, which meant we could watch the whole film, I would have been scundered trying to lead the youth group meeting right after getting back from the drama retreat.