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04 August 2011

What’s Greek about Shakespeare? with Amy Cohen


The Greeks did their theater with the lights on too. But their stages and their audiences were much larger. To illustrate this, our lecturer from this Tuesday, Amy Cohen (Professor of Classics at Randolph College, and daughter of the ASC’s co-founder and Director of Mission, Ralph Cohen) brought every camper into a circle on the King Theater stage, to feel how close everyone is together, then took everyone outside and had us form a circle in the grass outside, a circle at least four times as large. “This is the scale. Size matters in theater.”

One of the ways size matters so much in Amy Cohen’s productions is in the use of masks for their productions. She and her students have been using full helmet masks in their productions of Greek plays at the college amphitheater, which suit the larger space far better than a tighter indoor venue. To give the campers an experience with these masks, she gave them a little bit of choreography for “row, row, row your boat” and had a group of volunteers all sing and dance together.

The masks are a bit creepy when you first see them, but they improve with exposure, and they seem less weird when the wearers are portraying some sort of strong emotion or action. Cohen has mentioned that it usually takes an audience about five minutes to accept the masks in performance, but that that time is doubled when they have in-climate weather and have to perform indoors. The masks need more space to function. Once an audience has accepted the masks, the masks morph into the character portrayed -- so much so that she often gets questions about how they make the masks move, or how many masks they have for different emotions, when they don’t move at all, and the only emotions read onto them are the ones given by the actor through their bodies.

She had some of the campers do a couple of scenes with the masks on, to show a little of how the masks work in performance. Here is Rachel playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After her demonstration with the masks, Cohen fielded all sorts of questions about Greek theater, about the plays in this camp and their classical roots, and about Greek history. She dispelled some common misconceptions about “Classical Theater” such as a “tragic flaw” or the “Aristotelian unities” which get passed off as rules, when examination of the plays we know from the time show these “rules” are merely observations of what happens some of the time. She talked about Greek heroism, and how it is much more self-serving than Roman ideals. Greek heroes seemed to long for their names to be remembered far more than they were concerned about loyalty to a person or state. She also pointed out that the subjects of the Greek plays, particularly the tragedies, are big and noble and not at all colloquial. Today many translations attempt to make them feel like they are the sort of drama which might happen in the living room, but they are comprised of stories with massive scope and consequence. She also mentioned that love stories were not popular topics for drama (until later in Greek history, maybe 4th century BC) the way they are now. Shakespeare and Marlow take some of the scope and grandeur of these stories and add love stories to them, add normal everyday people who bring these stories home, into our lives and minds.

03 August 2011

What else is happening at YCTC?

Wednesday evening, the “What You Will” talent show went up, and since I know it beggars all description, I will simply pass along some photographs of the evening as soon as I can.

Thursday, instead of having a lecture, the whole camp went to see part of another show at the Blackfriars Playhouse: the Touring Troupe’s production of The Winter’s Tale, which was having a dress rehearsal during normal lecture time. However, the campers were only able to see the first half of the production, so there was a great variety of response to the pre-intermission part of the story. Some mentioning, “Leontes is pretty opinionated. I don’t think I like him at all.” or "Yay, for the depressing half!" Some of the campers have been in productions of this play; one had acted in The Winter’s Tale at ASCTC earlier this summer. Others were in the camp production two years back, and some had never seen or the play and had no idea of the story. It’s one of my favorites in Shakespeare, so here’s hoping they come back sometime to see the end. :)

As always, the weekends at camp are full of trips to the Playhouse to see the ASC’s shows, but this weekend featured two other special events. Saturday night was the Masquerade ball, a dress up affair featuring everything from Elizabethan Ball gowns to fairy wings. On Sunday the whole camp drove out to Lake Lofton to spend the day outside, where everyone had some time in the sun, on the beach, in the water, and just time to relax in the midst of all the craziness of camp.

Today we begin the home stretch, heading towards the final productions on Sunday afternoon. Everyone’s way more comfortable. We might make ice-cream runs during siesta, or sit around chatting about where best to find stain remover in walking distance of Stuart Hall. We start the late-night rehearsals in the Playhouse, where the campers get a chance to rehearse their plays in their performance space. This morning was the last workshop. There are only two more lectures, and the rest of the camp will be devoted to preparing for the final shows and preshow performances. You can feel the energy among the campers despite how much of their days are just plain hard work. Watching them succeed when we set the bar so high is a pleasure every day.

01 August 2011

Knife Fights

As we begin week three, we've been phasing out of our workshops and phasing in to our Pre-Show rehearsals. One of the recent workshop days, known affectionately as “Combat Day,” involved all of the campers. Some were in an unarmed combat workshop with Jeremy West and some were in an armed workshop with ASC actor, Ben Curns.

Rather than finding some way of giving Broadsword lessons with improvised cardboard tubes, the weapon these campers learned to work with was a makeshift knife -- or paint-stirrers, to be more precise. Before he even handed out the paint stirrers, Ben proclaimed this maxim: “Every cool fight is safe. Not every safe fight is cool.” And before the campers held those stirrers, Ben and Emily (one of the counselors trained in stage combat) gave them all a lot to think about in terms of how to stand, how to hold oneself, and how to react to a partner in a way which is both cool and which promotes the safety of yourself, your partner and everyone else around you.

The campers started exploring the different knife grips, a variety of “I am ready to fight” stances, and then paired up ready to tell some stories. Whether you’re fighting or dancing or just talking to each other, you are telling stories about the relationship you and your partner have. How you move together tells what that that person means to you, how angry or scared or hurt or young or old that other person makes you feel. When Ben started teaching them a choreographed fight, which he demonstrated with Emily, every pair of campers copied each move in the fight as they learned it bit by bit, but every fight was different. Some of the stories told by the fights were stories about one of the two combatants being frightened and not wanting to fight. Some of the fights told stories that looked deathly serious. Some of the fights looked more like dances, because of the years of ballet training the two combatants brought to the space. Half the class would work at a time, which gave everyone a chance not only to work, but also to watch the others working, and sometimes presented the opportunity to give comments as well. For instance, “She points her toe when she thrusts with her knife. Did you notice? She’s like the ballerina of death!”



Throughout the workshop Ben reminded the campers again and again, “I would rather see a slow fight which is totally clean than a faster fight which is even remotely sloppy.” So the campers stayed slow, stayed cool, stayed in communication with each other, and stayed safe. By the end of the workshop, there were a lot of really impressive looking fights, all worked through with patience and careful attention to detail. In Emily’s words, “Perfection is all I ask.”