End of Week One

We’ve finished the first week of camp, a week full to the brim with workshops. Already the campers have had classes in music, stage combat, text analysis, mask and movement, clown, and dance with actors from the ASC and from other theater professionals. To highlight just a couple of these, I’ll share a bit about Greg Phelps’s music class and Jeremy West’s stage combat.

Greg began his class by walking through some elements of music: rhythm and melody, harmony and dynamics, all the components which make it dramatic as its own art and add to the drama of a play. Next the campers analysed some songs in Shakespeare’s canon, suggesting adjectives to describe the different pieces. “Come away, come away death” is pretty hardcore sad, all about unrequited love and wanting to die because of it, whereas “Oh Mistress Mine, Where are you Roaming?", a song concerned with the shortness of life and the sweetness of love, has a gentler melancholy. Before long the campers used these ideas to work together and write their own song of “Under the Greenwood Tree.” Guitars, ukuleles, violin, melodica, Irish drum and beatboxing combined to make a many-layered song, one they could all be proud of. Throughout the process, Greg emphasized the power of “yes.” When people work together creatively, disagreement stops progress, so whenever there were two different ideas on the table, almost every time we found a way to incorporate both ideas into the song, using every person’s creativity to the utmost.

Stage Combat is probably one of the subjects that campers get most excited about learning, and that parents are least excited about their children trying out. In Jeremy West’s class, there was no end of precaution in the process, because safety is so crucial to the performance of any sort of effective combat. The campers learned several different punches and slaps, where each camper’s hands do not even touch their scene partner, but the two work together to “sell” the action and to make it look convincing to the audience. After slaps and punches, they went on to hairpulls and drags, again actions that look terrifying, but are incredible to watch when you know that the actor who looks as though he is the victim is actually the one in control of what’s happening in each scene. Because of an odd number of participants, Rebecca Speas (one of the counselors) was working with one of the campers, and in the scene they were creating, Speas was ripping one camper around by his hair yelling, “Learn your lines! Learn your lines!” to which he frantically yelled in reply, “I will, I promise!” Two minutes later, they laughed and switched roles, this time with the camper yelling, “I’ve learned them. There are no more!”

Other parts of the class included lots of practice in how to fall safely, and how to do a sitting, a standing, and a jumping role, giving all of the campers all the tools they need to act responsibly and safely onstage.

Besides the workshops, and, of course, rehearsals, Dr. Paul Menzer, the director of the MLitt/MFA program in Shakespeare and Performance, came to lecture about Shakespeare and text. He brought in an Arden Complete works of Shakespeare in a large heavy volume, a laptop, a smartphone, and a flashdrive, and made the point that they are all the Complete works of Shakespeare. Each one is a piece of technology used for conveying information, just vessels for their contents. But here is the paradox: despite containing all the same words, the vessel does make a difference. Whatever we might say, the medium changes the message.

Armed with this mindset, Menzer lead us to explore how books and papers and inks and handwriting and printing and the whole culture of text were different then than they are today. How do theses differences change the way we understand Shakespeare, and what might that mean for future generations, when books are no longer the primary means of accessing literature?

Menzer also touched on how much individual characters in the plays say about themselves and the characters around them by their words, by the way they are addressed, or by how they address others. Ophelia is constantly in a lower status than the characters around her. She has no nurse or handmaid, the people she talks with while sane are the Prince, her father, and her older brother, all of whom are telling her what to do. Also interesting is that when she goes mad and drowns, Ophelia is the only character in all of Shakespeare’s canon who reportedly drowns and does not miraculously return. Menzer asserts that it is possible that Viola, a character who beginsTwelfth Night nearly drowned, and who has a similar situation to Ophelia, could be Shakespeare’s second go, second take, second life for Ophelia. It was a fascinating lecture, and got the kids all thinking.

Other stuff happening at camp so far?
*Many trips to Split Banana for gelato.
*Campers memorizing their lines in their rooms, in the shade outside, in the laundry room, in the library and in any number of crazy accents.
*Conversations about everything they’re learning.
*Self motivated rehearsals for the upcoming talent show, “What You Will.”
*Music is everywhere. Campers picking things out on a piano or a new uke or just singing while they walk. And the counselors sing lullabies to the campers to put them to sleep.

More about the weekend activities coming soon!