High school drop-outs get their act together

By LINDA HERRICK

For a bunch of kids who've walked away from high school without any qualifications except being typecast as "at risk", the notion they should attempt a Shakespeare production seems ambitious.

Yet that's exactly what 14 teenagers are doing this week, in a dreamlike interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by their Best Training performing arts director Iosefa Enari.

Best Training, a private, Auckland-based scheme assisted by Winz and Education Department funding, was set up to target mainly Pacific Island and Maori teenagers who have opted for alternative forms of education instead of conventional school study. Enari, a trained dancer who is also studying for his masters degree at Scapa, says he prefers his kids to be known as "passionate youth" - not "at risk youth".

"In the performing art programme I've tried to create a stepping stones programme so the kids can use this time to find their feet and work out what they're going to do.

"The traditional form of college was just not suiting them, for all sorts of reasons. Most of them didn't get School Cert, maybe there were problems at home, they've had a rotten year at a crucial stage of their life and they haven't experienced anything particularly good at secondary school."

Enari says while the teenagers - aged from 15 to 19 - have done a "few little plays with me", A Midsummer Night's Dream is a big leap. "They've been learning the lines for six weeks. Because they walked away from the academic life and for many of them English is a second language, this is a positive thing."

Enari, who has been teaching with Best Training for four years, says the course can turn the kids on to the possibility of dance or drama as a career.

"A lot of them will move on to other things and for some this will just be a year or two in their life when they did drama. But I've had a handful who've gone on to tertiary education. The first year I had one, last year I had three."

The bottom line, though, is that having the confidence to perform in front of peers and an audience builds confidence.

"Some of them are really shy but repetition breaks that down," says Enari. "It gives them a little bit more self-esteem.

"They may have come here thinking they'd be given something remedial to do, but after they've met a few people, like guest artists and that sort of thing, they also start to get an appreciation and interest in the arts."

* A Midsummer Night's Dream, Kingsland Central Studio, Central Ave, Kingsland, Wednesday to Saturday, 8pm.