No Funding? No Problem! by Haley

No Funding? No Problem! by Haley - December 2019 Scholarship Essay

Some people know exactly what they have wanted to do since they could remember. Easy jobs to imagine, like an astronaut, or a firefighter, or a princess, come to mind. Others have no idea what to do until college, or even after that. Neither of these circumstances are lesser than each other, and indeed both are entirely valid ways of approaching the future. I’ve found, however, that I fall just about in the middle of that scale. I may not know exactly what to do with my life, but I’ve known (generally) what I’ll be doing since I was 14 years old. And it’s all thanks to the Bahrain School Theatre Department.

Sort of.

My school has nearly no support for the arts. Every year, orders for new supplies get lost or forgotten, the band has to make do with fewer music stands than members, and the theatre department has, essentially, nothing. No mic system, no tech department, and almost no funding that we don’t raise ourselves. Of course, I didn’t know that when I moved to Bahrain in 2014. I joined a theatre class on a whim, and it completely transformed my life.

The theatre teacher was also new; a highly qualified woman and experienced teacher of both English and Drama, she was not deterred by the sorry state of our school cafeteria (where we are allowed to perform) nor our tech. In the absence of all the trimmings usually afforded to a slightly better-funded theatre department, we had no choice but to work from the ground up. Project onstage, ignore the heat of the aging lights, move in your space like the set pieces are there, and give the audience a reason to applaud. Monologue nights and semester shows built our program financially, but the work was all us students.

To say that I loved this would be a severe understatement. In my assessment, every teenager searches for control in their life as a way of combating the immense lack of it in nearly every capacity. Some students fall into honor societies, student government, or sports. Others join band, or take art, or dance with an after-school group. Theatre gave me control over my world that no other facet of my life had afforded me. Who I was and how people saw me finally belonged to me, and nothing could take that away from me. Six years later, I am now the “veteran” of the BS Theatre Department (an unfortunate name, I know), and that feeling of absolute power and exhilaration onstage has not faded away.

Joining the Theatre Department has not just had the academic benefits of giving my life direction, but has also saved me in a very personal way. At a time when friends were almost impossible to make, Drama gave me a group of people that I already knew and liked, and provided to me a shared interest with which to break the ice. Theatre has taken me to Europe for competitions, giving me the self-confidence and validation some students can only dream of, and for which I will be eternally grateful. And, most importantly, it was my theatre teacher who first noticed my steadily declining mental health during my Sophomore year and helped me seek the medical attention that I needed. It does not feel like an understatement to say that had I not joined the Theatre Department, I might not be here today.

I’ll be pursuing Theatre in college next year, and in the meantime I coach newer members of our program how to improve their skills, deal with the lack of microphones, and leave the audience begging for more. Humility is woven into the fabric of theatre, but thanks to the Bahrain School Theatre Department, I was able to simultaneously gain a sense of purpose and self-love.