We are seated on powder-blue plastic chairs in a semi-circle. Some of us wipe tiny tears from the outer corners of our eyelids. Silently. Almost secretly. Not sure we want anyone to know that our colleague's performance took us beyond this school cafetorium on a summer's day.

The scene she had just composed was barely two minutes long. No props, no scenery, no costume. Not even any words. We felt the woman's tender nostalgia as she recalled her grandmother. The woman put on earrings and a necklace that had belonged to her grandmother. After her grandmother's death, her mother had given them to her.

The actor patted the seemingly real necklace on her neck and smiled, looking into the distance, remembering her grandmother, for this was a true story. She stood still, and, as she had learned from the theater coach, said, "Scene," to end the performance. The clapping of the ten of us in her audience broke the silence.

Jeri Pitcher, the instructor of this theater improvisation workshop, exclaimed: These scenes are amazing! She told the workshop students, who are all Farmington-area teachers: You are not acting. You are doing these things. It's how much you use your senses and believe what you are doing.

The assignment for this second morning of the Found Story Workshop had been for each teacher to compose a scene in which she would use an object about which she has a strong emotion. The actors could not use the real object in the scene. They were to "recreate the object using only their senses," Pitcher had explained. "If you believe in the scene, with all of your senses, the scene will come across."

The goal of Pitcher's workshop is to teach teachers how to use theater as a tool for teaching their core curriculum. In the "found story" work, people discover and express the stories within themselves.

The process, which various SAD 9 teachers have been adopting through this program for the past three years, brings to life all kinds of subject matter - science, social studies, language arts, foreign languages. Previously dry facts take on new meaning for students when they can experience the relevance of the material to their own life, to their own stories.

Although the "object" scenes performed last week were spontaneous and natural, they did not just suddenly materialize. The day before, Pitcher introduced the teachers to the found story work with warm-up body and voice exercises. Then, in the first of several focus games, participants passed a "magic ball" around the circle, concentrating to make its shape and weight believable to all.

Pitcher designs her workshops to move through a series of progressions, each of which adds a theater element. To the focus element, she added the elements of cooperation and teamwork in an activity in which the group creates a machine. Each participant contributes her own repetitive movement and noise to the moving sculpture.

The next step of the found story technique is to learn to build the what, who, and where of a story. In small groups, the teachers developed silent scenes based on a card on which Pitcher had written a sense and an action verb, such as "tasting salt." Pitcher coached the actors to focus on the sense and to believe that what they were showing was real.

To learn to create a believable "where," Pitcher gave each small group a card with a place. Develop a beginning, middle, and end for your scene, she advised. "Explore the environment and how it affects your senses. Decide who you are. There may be some conflict in these scenes."

Each group's silent scene clearly communicated its place: a sandbox, treehouse, McDonald's, the bottom of the sea. Pitcher explained that she starts this work with silent scenes, because many people are afraid to speak in front of others. She said that she has noticed that after a few of these exercises, kids are "begging to talk" in the next scene that they compose.

The quiet students, she said, gain more confidence, and "the more verbal ones realize there are others around besides themselves. The hierarchies are breaking down."

For the "who" element of stories, Pitcher began by leading the teachers through a "physical centering exercise" in which they walked around the room to explore which part of their body they lead with - their nose or hips or knees, for example. Then Pitcher had them try centers other than their own, and to exaggerate, thus creating, noted Pitcher, some "outrageous characters."

The work in that first session, a reflective writing assignment, and the assignment to compose a "sense memory-emotional memory" object scene were all activities that enabled the teachers to present the powerfully funny, sad, and tender scenes the next day.

Jeri Pitcher and the teachers will team teach similar sessions in their classrooms in October. The program is a collaboration with the Foothills Arts Center and is funded by the Maine Arts Commission and other SAD 9 grant funds.

All the classroom's a stage and all the kids are players

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