First Couple Days of Camp

Dear parents, friends, interested readers, all,

I am writing from the library at Stuart Hall, and while everyone else is hard at work in rehearsal, I thought I would post a first update on the camp and what the last day and a half has held.

For me, the auditions at ASCTC are as exciting as the final performances. Monday morning, these campers come full of potential and energy and dive right into the excitement and the joy of working. Doreen begins with exercises to help get some jitters out, and to remind the campers of the importance of timing and focus, of beginnings and endings, and the place of stillness onstage. All of which skills they put straight to use after learning to sing a round composed by some of the counselors and then divide into groups of three and make their own performances out of that song. Highlights of this section included a camper making up a guitar part to accompany his group, some use of mime, storytelling, unison movement and beatboxing, all of which gives the directors not only a good sense of the special skills of the campers but also shows teamwork, energy, stage presence and creativity.

The next section of the auditions is another sort of devised performance but in much larger groups. In three groups the campers tell the stories of the plays of this session without words, but aided by ten carefully chosen lines from the plays, and a list of required actions. These performances can be so beautiful they take away one’s breath, as Shakespeare’s images become physicalized, and these young people present stars burning in their spheres, the pain of isolation, the delight of young love and the sorrow of endings. Perhaps most impressive was the ten seconds of stillness as all the villagers gathered around the maddened Jailer’s Daughter, who was staring into the distance, “dreaming of another, better world.”

By the time the audition gets to the much anticipated 10 lines of prepared text, the campers were so enthusiastic and so eager to applaud each other’s success that we had to stop them to avoid spilling over into lunch.

The other particularly exciting part of Monday is the tour of Blackfriars Playhouse. After a brief of dense introduction to the whole of the building, including costume shop, trap door, backstage, balcony and then onto the main deal, which is again lead by Doreen, who gets all the kids onstage, all waking up the space and fills them full of questions.

How can you frame yourself in the architecture of this particular stage?
How can you give or command power onstage?
Everything is full of straight lines and angles except for the discovery space, the little curtained entrance right in the middle. How can you use that fluidity?
How can you hide onstage? What makes you take up more than usual?
What about your own voice in the space?
How much sound can you make?
How soft can you be and still be totally clear? It isn’t any easier than being loud, and takes all sorts of energy and focus.

The campers all got a chance onstage to feel themselves in that space, but also were right there in the theater watching their fellow campers, and learning just as much from watching others work, as working themselves. We looked at geometric figures and how, like painters, we can use shapes and lines to create focus and beauty onstage. As Doreen says, “make it art. Don’t make a ‘sort of’ line, make a line!”

Right before dinner the cast lists were posted and that evening the directors ran a “Paraphrase Extravaganza” teaching scansion and meter, rhetoric and how to paraphrase so the campers can begin really digging their teeth into the text.

This morning, Jeremy Febig lectured “On Shakespeares and Centers” which introduced Shakespeare and a smattering of history surrounding the man, as well as the ASC and some of the founding goals of the company. Covering conceptions of Shakespeare as unfamiliar, commonplace, mandatory, unimaginative, fixed up or intimidating, Febig explored some causes of these understandings of Shakespeare and what places like the ASC change these understandings. When produced with skill and imagination, using the staging conditions for which the plays were written, Shakespeare is seen for what he really is, relevant to his own day and ours, in conversation with our world, and with the world in which he wrote the plays. The campers engaged the material and asked lots of questions, shared many ideas of how Shakespeare is and could be taught. One camper said she hadn’t had a bad time learning Shakespeare in her English classes at School, but that it was difficult because they never read anything out loud. In her words, “it’s easier to act Shakespeare than to read it.”