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Fidelity FutureStage Leap Artistic Director Ryan Lee on Guiding Student's Creativity
Nov 10, 2022
Ryan Lee is a professional actor and a member of both the Screen Actor's Guild (SAG) and Actor's Equity Association (AEA). As Fidelity FutureStage's Artistic Director, he guides the students as they navigate the creative journey from the first rehearsal to the final performance.
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I'm Ryan Lee, Artistic Director of LEAP
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Last year, being our first year doing it, we got the triumvirate of Fidelity offering this incredible opportunity
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getting a Broadway producer, Richard Frankel Productions, and getting an education wing, which is LEAP
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to go out into the schools and offer playwriting. Basically immerse these young people into the world of theater
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for an entire school year to once a week, sometimes twice a week
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come in and force-feed art to people who may not have ever thought about art
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and then get them to create something that, and really kind of an amazing way, in the beginning of the school year
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They don't have any sense of where they're going to be in June
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but by June they're going to have been completely changed. A lot of these kids are completely changed by what we do
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Bringing these professional theater artists into the schools and then bringing celebrities into the schools
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and then bringing the kids to the performances and having the celebrities talk to them
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it's a level of involvement in theater that I never had when I was a kid
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and most kids in the world have never had What they being given once a week for nine months is pretty powerful We actually trying to treat them as professional theater artists And to the extent that you know in the night that they perform
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we have a professional theater with a professional crew and professional directors and all these people that are really trying to treat them as professionals
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And in the first year, we learned all the pitfalls of how to do it
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And hopefully we're trying to solve a lot of this this year to make it kind of come off a little bit more smoothly
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But the truth is, we still have a lot of things we didn't expect
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Last year, we let every one of our teaching artists kind of approach it in their own way
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And we still did that this year. But we did create a curriculum. So we actually printed up a curriculum which gave them an idea of character and conflict and setting
2:15
and all the different topics that we wanted them to cover. And said, you can kind of cover it
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Here's some suggestions on how you might do it, but ultimately, you know, we're not going to tell you how to be a teacher because you're an effective teacher on your own
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Just try to get these messages across. And sometimes they could find that certain exercises work better in the middle schools that didn't work in the high schools and vice versa
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But ultimately, we basically encourage them to bring their own stories, their own truth, their own lives, to write about themselves, to write about what they care about
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teach them what a play is, how a play is different from a novel
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You know if you want to write in slang if you want to write in poetry if you want to write a rap everything is right Whatever you want to do And we continue to refine it Then we bring in professional dramaturgs
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And they have to revise it over and over again. And they're getting frustrated
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So I have to rewrite it again. But they don't realize that this process is going to continue
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And even through the next couple of months until June, we're going to still continue to tweak the play
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The playwrights are always there. The playwrights have a voice in the rehearsal
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Each one of the teaching artists will ask them, so do you have any notes to give us about what's going on today
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Things you'd like to say? Do you feel like the story is being told? I go into as many schools as I can every week
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to try to also give them my energy about it, and they see that somebody else is involved and saying
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oh, this person really cares. And having these teaching artists, and me, and Alice
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and Fidelity's going to show up, and having these celebrities come to the school
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I mean, it gives them a sense of, wow, there's a lot of people that really care about this
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and they're actually really caring about me doing this. I'm so glad to be a part of something that is not just about theater
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but it's about changing people's perspective on their lives, you know. But in this program, they're being moved themselves
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They're moving themselves. And if we keep doing this program, we're going to get more and more knowledge on what works and what doesn't
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My hope is that we can just continue to inspire. And I could tell you a number of stories of kids that I sat down and talked to who literally who said they rethinking their future
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My feeling is, while I've worked with kids, I usually tell them that most of their lives they probably, I'm guessing, have been underestimated
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They've been told, you're just a kid. Oh, you know, you can't do that
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And my feeling is with this program, we go in and say, yes, you can. I think you are capable of doing so much more than you think you're capable of doing
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and that everybody else has given you credit for. And every time we go in there, if I can just be as present as possible with them
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and I give them my honesty and my truth and I expect them to respect me
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and I respect them, it rubs off. It literally makes them realize, wow, there's a lot more things in the world that I can do
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whether they become an actor or go into theater that's secondary to the whole thing
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we're not trying to create new theater artists as much as we're just saying
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here's something that you can accomplish and approach your life in possibly
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a new way
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