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Heath Theater Workshop Helps Youth Overcome Anxiety,Depression

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Participants in the Hilltown Youth Theatre’s Recovery Theatre winter intensive at Heath Elementary School, led by founder and artistic director, Jonathan Diamond, take part in a warm-up exercise Saturday, January 14, 2017.

By SHELBY ASHLINE 
Recorder Staff

Saturday, January 14, 2017
HEATH — With help from fellow theater workshop participants, 15-year-old Alex Schmidt climbed atop a large wooden spool and was carefully hoisted into the air. As she stood up and stretched her arm to the ceiling, a grin spread across her face.

From Friday through Sunday, participants in the Recovery Theatre’s “Winter Recovery Intensive” sprinted, crawled and pranced around Heath Elementary School, performing various group exercises to music. The Recovery Theatre is an initiative of Hilltown Youth Theatre.

While it may sound like simple fun and games, the activities all have a therapeutic focus, according to Recovery Theatre Co-Founder Jonathan Diamond. Diamond, who is also co-founder of Hilltown Youth Theatre, specializes in addiction and the clinical needs of adolescence.

“The intensives are for kids overcoming anxiety, depression (or) addiction,” Diamond said. While there have been intensives in the summer for the past three years, this is the first year that Diamond has been able to offer additional intensives in winter and spring.

According to Diamond and Alyssa Wright, also co-founder of the Recovery Theatre, the program is supported largely through donations from individuals and businesses, along with grants from the Opioid Task Force of Franklin County, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts and the Charles H. Hall Foundation. A wide age range of individuals help out with the program in volunteer capacities, and participants come from across western Massachusetts. One winter intensive participant came from Connecticut.

Throughout the weekend, the group performed writing exercises to put feelings on paper, made collages, did breathing exercises and wrote song lyrics about the challenges they hoped to overcome.

For Alex, who participates in the intensives to overcome anxiety, having the support she receives through the Recovery Theatre has been invaluable.

“(My first summer intensive) is probably the most I’ve interacted with people in a long time,” said Alex, of South Deerfield. “There’s so much support here. It’s great because you get to build yourself as a person.”

Being involved with the Recovery Theatre has helped Schmidt gain confidence, while also gaining “lifelong friends.”

“The (workshops) helped me realize that any problem, you’re very able to get over,” she said. “This good energy made me realize I’m definitely going to come out on the other side.”

Sam, a 13-year-old Wendell resident who declined to use a last name, said the program helped to overcome depression two years ago, and is now helping to deal with anxiety and self-harm. Though starting the intensive feeling nervous, after spending time with the group, Sam was able to grow comfortable.

“I feel like they stayed with me … We’re taking care of each other,” Sam said.

“This is pretty much the only place that I don’t feel self-conscious in my body,” said 13-year-old Morgan McIntosh of Shelburne Falls.

Many of the winter intensive’s participants commented on how the Recovery Theatre offered them a unique safe space, where mental health troubles aren’t stigmatized.

“There’s a sense of community that really transcends the client-counselor relationship,” said 26-year-old Kaia Jackson of Northampton, who also works as a counselor at Pathways in Greenfield. “We’re creating kind of a culture where we all practice being a healer for one another … I feel we have the potential to be healers in any context we’re in.”

Winter Theatre Enrichment Programs

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From October to April the Hilltown Drama Club (formally the Heath School Drama Club) makes its home at the Hawlemont School in Charlemont MA. Our Theatre Enrichment Program serves students from all nine towns that comprise the Mohawk Trail Regional School District (MTRSD), all four of its elementary schools as well as students from neighboring schools districts (e.g., Rowe, Greenfield and Turners.) Our campuses are nestled among old orchards and pastureland at the outer reaches of the Pioneer Valley. The rural setting, while idyllic, limits access to affordable arts education. Our towns comprise the largest geographic school district in the state, and the poorest. With two thirds of our students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, the Hilltown Drama Club provides access to arts and music education that many families can’t otherwise reach.  [Read more…] about Winter Theatre Enrichment Programs

HYT Summer Theatre Workshop

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The Hilltown Youth Theatre Summer Workshop is the flagship of our youth programming. The Workshop provides much needed, high quality, intensive arts experiences for young people in one of Massachusetts’ most rural areas. For the past seven years, through artistic excellence, exemplary work with young people and a commitment to building a supportive community for youth, the Workshop has helped young people develop personally and artistically through professional caliber, community-centered theater.  Find Out More

Recovery Theatre

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Massachusetts is currently experiencing an epidemic of opiate addiction that is ravaging our communities and our youth. It is in the headlines on an almost daily basis. Task forces have been formed and prevention budgets bolstered. However, if we expect young people to “just say no” to a chemical high we must recognize the healing alternative: their own creativity. Theater is the real anti-drug program. Find Out More

Speaker tells Shelburne Falls how he took on addiction through theater

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Click here to see article

By JOSHUA SOLOMON 
Recorder Staff

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

 

SHELBURNE FALLS — Standing in front of a group gathered at the Senior Center for an Opioid Task Force community meeting, Eric Fahey talked about how he dropped out of school at the age of 16 and later battled addiction.

It is in that life that Fahey learned to repair things. He became sober in November of 1989. Shortly thereafter the carpenter by trade was asked to help out with a theater program.

“You grow up in a situation where you have to figure out how to survive you become a fixer,” Fahey said. “Unfortunately that’s what addicts bring to the table.”

It is at that theater program where he eventually turned to performing to help him manage his recovery.

“Once you have that experience of doing that,” Fahey said about acting. “It is all about the continuing support of building self esteem and self worth.”

Now 28 years sober Fahey has helped the community in Greenfield turn to theater as a means to help them with their recovery too. A couple years ago he formed the Mustard Seed Theater at The RECOVER Project, a two hour, self-produced production that invited people in the community to sing and perform spoken word among other acts.

“I was really blessed that I was able to stay sober and part of that experience was in my third year of sobriety, getting involved in theater.”

At the second of four town meetings the Opioid Task Force is holding, members of the community gathered to share stories of how the task force can continue to fight the ever-present opioid epidemic.

Last week in Deerfield some of the conversation was focused on the potential strengths in medically assisted treatment, like with suboxone or methadone.

Once again a panel of representatives from the region were present, including Northwest District Attorney David Sullivan, Baystate Franklin Medical Center President Cindy Russo, Register Probate and co-founder of the task force John Merrigan and Greenfield Community College President Bob Pura, among others.

Both Fahey and, to his surprise, another advocate for theater to help fight the epidemic came forward Tuesday evening.

Jonathan Diamond, the founder of the Recovery Theater, spoke about his project that helps young people with a range of issues including addiction, anxiety and depression.

Diamond, also the co-founder of Hilltown Youth Theater, has helped students from across the county feel comfortable in their own skin in various seasonal programs.

With young adults, substance abuse doesn’t come in neat, little categories and boxes,” Diamond said. “It comes with trauma and addiction.”

The program combines theater with trapeze arts too.

Arlie Hart, who leads the trapeze part of the program, discussed his own journey: from a household of alcoholics to a builder of trapeze to a teacher of it to kids battling various mental health and addiction issues.

“If you teach someone to fly on the flying trapeze,” Hart said. “You learn that you can do something when you’re afraid and you can make a choice and function even when you’re afraid.”

Hart added: “Recovery just doesn’t start and stop; recovery is a process. It’s continuous. We have to work as a community from the perspective that funding and support and education has to be continuous. We can’t just throw money at a program and say ‘ok, this is going to be it.’”

Next meetingThe next Opioid Task Force town meeting will be June 1 at Athol Hospital.

Recovery Theatre

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Massachusetts is currently experiencing an epidemic of opiate addiction that is ravaging our communities and our youth. It is in the headlines on an almost daily basis. Task forces have been formed and prevention budgets bolstered. However, if we expect young people to “just say no” to a chemical high we must recognize the healing alternative: their own creativity. Theater is the real anti-drug program.

The geographic position of Franklin County off of Interstate-91 has made our community a prime target for drug trafficking along the I-91 corridor, which has been nicknamed the “heroin highway.” In the past ten years, heroin use has grown exponentially in our community and in the past three years the rate of youth prescription drug misuse and abuse has nearly doubled, making substance use in adolescence an extremely important problem to address in order to meet the needs of local families. [Read more…] about Recovery Theatre

Innovation

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What the Hilltown Youth Performing Arts Programs is doing is treating the youngest people in this rural community as emerging artists; and treating them as future activists, actors and activators, as future citizens and future leaders.  It’s social. It’s economic. And I’d even say it’s spiritual.  

—Matthew Glassman (Co-Artistic Director, Double Edge Theatre)

Valley Advocate StageStruck: An Epic Collaboration

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“This is the first time in six years I’ve directed a production that’s stayed in one space the entire time,” says Jonathan Diamond. He is referring to his truly epic stage version of The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings prequel. So, he adds, “because I couldn’t move the audience from room to room, I decided to move the room around the audience.”

The room in question is the auditorium at Mohawk Trail Regional High School in Shelburne Falls. High platforms and scenic murals flank the walls and the two ramps up to the stage have been converted into flowing rivers. “I wanted to transform the space entirely, so the minute the audience walked into the building they were transported to another world,” Diamond explains. The multi-dimensional production is also multi-disciplinary, featuring circus skills, giant puppets, choreographed battle sequences and a live six-piece band.

The show is huge and complex, fielding a cast of 35 middle- and high-schoolers plus another 30-plus choral singers and battle extras, and employing the talents of a dozen or more guest artists from the Valley and hilltowns. They include music director Scott Halligan, a Double Edge veteran, and Pan Morigan of Chrysalis Theater, who wrote original songs for the show; film production designer Larry Sampson, who created the puppets and costumes; Double Edge ensemble member Hannah Jarrell; and Mike Pray and others from Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble, who led combat training.

The production is not just a Mohawk event, but a collaboration with two other schools—The Academy at Charlemont and Heath Elementary—which has grown out of a long-term relationship with Ashfield’s Double Edge Theatre. Diamond, who works in the drama programs at all three schools, is a regular participant in Double Edge’s Open Trainings, in which the company shares its physical theater vocabulary with other artists and interested civilians. Many of his students and their parents have joined in the trainings, and that aesthetic informs the work on this show.

“The training experiences at Double Edge help us expand our imaginations and hone our craft,” Diamond says, “but it’s so much more than that. At the heart of what we do is teaching children and young adults ensemble work and how to be part of a team. What I’ve learned most from my time spent at Double Edge is that theater isn’t just about acting and set building, it’s about world-making. We’re using theater to build supportive, creative communities.”

In The Hobbit, actors balance on huge rolling cable spools, and the stage is hung with half a dozen aerial fabrics, long strands of “working silk” on which the young performers shinny and hang. These elements “are definitely attention getters,” Diamond says, “and yes, they help us create beautiful images. But they also help us push beyond our physical limits and expand our imaginations.”

Diamond views the interacademic collaboration as “a cost-effective way to bring professional artists into the schools” and sees it as part of an effort “to create a larger sense of community that transcends buildings and school campuses and instills in young people a sense of place and appreciation of hilltown life and passion for the arts.”•

The Hobbit: March 8-10, Mohawk Trail Regional High School, 24 Ashfield Road, Shelburne Falls. Tickets $5-$7 at local retailers, (866) 967-8167 or mohawkschools.org/mohawk.php.

Contact Chris Rohmann at StageStruck@crocker.com.