Clown class with Dan Kennedy

“Hello, my name is Danny, and I am a clown.” That’s how our clowning class began. Every camper walked across the space in total neutrality and sat in the chair, looked at everyone, said that one line, and walked off stage. Dan Kennedy, a long time ASC actor and experienced clown, started the class by saying that “the hardest thing you’ll ever be asked to do onstage is nothing.” The campers began by attempting to show nothing, and even though everyone was trying hard to remain neutral, their personalities showed through anyways -- personalities that we would exaggerate and expand as the class went on.

To shake things up, next we did a bunch of fast theater games -- keeping a ball in the air, bippity-bippity-bop, woosh-woah-zap, and then a game of silent redlight-greenlight. As they played, the campers and Dan together looked at the comedy in the games. When the redlight greenlight game started to lose energy, he shook it up and turned it into “oscar variety” red-light green light and set up a scenario of a flock of girls running to meet a particularly handsome man, but not wanting him to know of their attempts to get close to him. The running and stopping of red-light greenlight became a game of posing, of sudden changes of attitude. One girl would be running for all she was worth one second and the next second she would have frozen - effortlessly arranging her hair when the guy was turned to see her. Dan threw in lots of obstacles for the kids. One time when they guys were the ones racing, they needed to “look sexy” when the lady turned their way, but since they had been running the moment before they were not necessarily in a good position to make that work, they had to find a way to “deal with the problem” they’d created for themselves. These campers had to make strong choices. Specific choices. Big choices. Clowns are made of big choices. And so we zipped to the next exercise.

FUNNY WALKS. This clown routine is one all about imitation and exaggeration. The campers paired up and then followed their partners around, imitating any quirks or personality exaggerating the idiosyncrasies to the point of absurdity. Then all the funny walks paraded around, and though they were crazy, the walkers strode with absolute seriousness. We learned about poker faces and how serious presentations can be much funnier than goofy acts. Then we traveled on to playing with props.

The campers divided into groups, and Dan gave each group a bunch of props with the instruction to use the prop to tell as many different stories as possible, without using any words. So suddenly a pasta strainer became a hat and a magnifying glass and butterfly net and land mine and dozen other things. Flip flops became a defibrillator, then the flip flops became the ears of a baby elephant (with a pool noodle trunk and a laundry basket body); the laundry basket became a boat and the boat became an umbrella, and an umbrella became the head of a rattlesnake made of all the campers in the group with a tambourine for its rattle at the tail. Creativity poured right out of these kids, and it led us right into our last exercise.

Dan divided them into groups of three, and those groups each had to make up a scene, without any words, with this scenario: A couple is at a restaurant. A waiter is annoying. A proposal occurs. What makes it a clown scene? How high the stakes are can make it a clown scene.  Are the couple a little bit in love? Or madly, wildly, passionately in love? Is the waiter a little annoying or annoying beyond comprehension and belief? Is it McDonalds or a five star cuisine with 7 courses? They made the scenes in 4 minutes flat, and every one had us in stitches.

Comedy. It’s serious business.

Elizabethan Dance with Jeremy West

What do a a group of 18 teenagers do on a Wednesday morning at this camp? They gather in a great open space, walled by huge windows which pour in the sunlight, and they learn four hundred year old dance moves. Jeremy West, a favorite teacher in this camp, and this session’s director of Henry VI, Part One, usually teaches stage combat, but session he teaches these campers dancing as well. The two disciplines have a great deal in common. Both consist of choreographed movement on stage following a series of set moves, and both require careful teamwork, but there the similarities end. 

Jeremy told the campers that he’d be teaching them a jig, and he asked if anyone knew anything about jigs. In Shakespeare we know of jigs as court dances, but also as the dance that actors would perform at the end of plays. Today they have rather different cultural place. Most of the campers mentioned them as “pub dances” or “sort of Irish-y.” Elise, one camper who Irish dances competitively, shared the names and types of all the jigs in contemporary Irish Dance, and (when we begged her) she demonstrated these dances as well.

Which brought us to learning our own Elizabethan dance from Jeremy. Listening to a Renaissance consort’s formal but upbeat music, we watched and learned from Jeremy’s easy grace and confidence. In this dance, and in many Elizabethan dances, the moves are not difficult; most of them are simply ordered steps, claps or holding one’s hands in a particular shape. But it’s not about the difficulty of a particular move -- It’s about style.  As Jeremy says, “It’s about having the chutzpah to say, ‘I look awesome when I do this move.’” So the campers practiced their moves. Some campers have extensive backgrounds in dance, and at first it was easy to pick out the trained dancers. They were the ones who held their backs straight and upright. They looked directly at their partners. They were specific in the details of each move, pointing their toes or aware of the shape of their hands. But as the workshop went on and everyone practiced more and switched partners again and again, the less experienced dancers learned from the more experienced ones. At one point Justin (a camper regularly teaching other campers to swing dance) danced with Liam, a camper with a casual careless physicality. As they danced, Justin took on some of Liam’s swagger and Liam became much more precise and clear in his movements, and they were both loving every bit of it. Everywhere you looked you could see campers helping each other, and by the end, the whole group moved in striking unison, and I couldn’t remember who had looked like experienced dancers and who didn’t. It was such a pleasure to watch. 

It's "Something Fantastic" to Collaborate with Bob Jones

Camp Director Symmonie Preston teasingly titled Bob Jones’ second lecture “Something Fantastic,” and of course he did not disappoint. This time, Bob focused on the concept of collaboration and the importance of collaboration in the playwriting process. The three plays that the campers will perform on August 5th were written using some form of collaboration, and this lecture served as a valuable enhancement to the campers’ understanding of the productions they’re working on. All three were written during England’s “huge thrust” for new plays. This era of popular demand called for single companies to putt on ten to twenty plays a month. This output rate surpassed the ability of a single playwright, whose writing hours were truncated by the sunrise and sunset. Therefore, collaborating with other playwrights and various sources helped to increase output immensely. Collaboration as a concept is fairly simple but occurs in many forms and places. Bob asked the campers to brainstorm in helping him to compile several lists.

Different modes of collaboration between playwrights:
1) Simultaneous partnered collaboration – when two or more playwrights write a play by constantly exchanging ideas so that each scene is the product of multiple authors.

2) Plot and dialogue – when one playwright would come up with the concept for the play and write the basic plott or platt and the other playwright would then write the dialogue for specific scenes.

3) Scene by scene collaboration – when once the plot is agreed upon, two or more playwrights alternate the scenes they write.

Scholars speculate that Beaumont and Fletcher wrote A King and No King in a mixture of the second and third mode. Fletcher wrote the plot and a few scenes, while Beaumont wrote the majority of the dialogue. But these three modes only cover collaboration between playwrights, when there are many more abstract sources of collaborations that a playwright would make use of.

1) Actors – playwrights would base characters off of the actors that would be performing the play
2) Classical Sources – allusions to Greek mythology
3) Historical chronicles
4) Poems/ballads
5) Travelogues – descriptions of foreign lands
6) Stock characters from old plays
7) Recent and current plays – Shakespeare drew from plays running concurrently with his own, and even drew from his other plays, reusing scenarios and certain lines.

After compiling this list of resources for collaboration, Bob presented the campers with the ultimate challenge: to write a nine scene play collaborating with each other and drawing from A King and No King, Henry VI Part I, and Much Ado about Nothing as source texts. The campers started by outlining the main action for each scene. Then they broke into groups of four to write each scene, where they defined the motivations behind the main action. Once the campers wrote their scenes, each group exchanged and edited a different group’s scene. By modifying this new scene to support their authored scene, the campers used this step to make the play more cohesive.

In the end, the play was a hilarious mash-up featuring the protagonists Beadick and Benetrice (a jumble of Much Ado’s Beatrice and Benedick). A King and No King’s clown Bessus joined Much Ado’s Dogberry to wage a war against France led by Don Talbot (fusion of Much Ado’s Don John and Henry’s John Talbot). Much Ado’s Hero acted as a Mulan-type by disguising herself as a man and running off to fight in the war. Not all of the scenes connected well, and there were plenty of character inconsistencies, but the campers learned that those are two side effects of scene-by-scene collaboration. Although the groups weren’t technically supposed to communicate with one another, somehow a random dancing Spaniard appeared in every scene, creating suspicion that some conversation had occurred. This exercise not only taught the campers the struggles and benefits of collaboration and gave them a chance to hone their playwriting skills, but the cold reading of the play also brought campers near to tears from laughing so hard . Everyone could agree that with the guidance of Bob they had indeed created “Something Fantastic”.

--Emma Lo

They came singing...

Every year the music in ASC Theatre Camp is a treat, but I must say that this session is especially full of strong musicians eager to play and sing together. The campers all came to make theater together, but many of the campers this year came to make music as well. From the first day these campers arrived, already the lounges were full of songs mashed up together, songs they were sharing and learning and teaching to each other. 

In their auditions, they sang together in groups, many of them singing with people they’d only just met, learning a song fresh and new to them all. Emma has already written beautifully about the first workshop with Greg Phelps, but I thought I’d add in a bit from my own experience playing music along with the campers in the workshop. When Greg gave everyone a five minute break, rather than hanging around chatting, a group of the campers started pulling out their instruments and making up a song all on their own, in anticipation of creating a song all together. As the workshop progressed and the instrumentalists and the vocalists worked on different parts of the process, they’d take turns, stopping to listen to each other, and would inevitably freak out about how the music comes together. “That harmony is flippin sweet!” they’d say, or, “Yeah, trumpet!” or just burst out with, “It’s so good!” These adolescents know how to give and take in a creative setting, and by working together, they create an artistic whole much larger than the sum of its parts. 

But lest you think this exuberance and talent for music is only in workshops and free time, please know it comes into the rehearsals as well. Stopping in for a rehearsal of Much Ado about Nothing, the whole cast and artistic team for that show gathered together to brainstorm ideas for the various moments of music in that play. Someone suggested that they play “I need a Hero” for the dance, and immediately one Sarah, one of the campers said, “oh, I can play that on my uke, but I don’t have it with me.” Laura, our Dogberry chirped in with “you can borrow mine, I’ve got it with me,” and in no time Sarah performed her rendition of the song, and though I don’t know what choices they will eventually make, that ukulele rendition of the song went straight to the heart of the cast, and everyone applauded her skills. 

The campers do not make all the music of this camp. Several of the counselors have studied music in college, and the lullabies to the campers this session are particularly sweet. Zach, one of the counselors, is a prodigious guitarist (you can see his videos here), and two nights ago instead of regular lullabies he played an original work for the campers before they went to bed.

In addition to all of this, the Heifetz International Music Institute is sharing our campus with us this summer. Tonight some of us will attend a faculty recital of some of the most respected string teachers in the world. I know it will be a unique experience, as campers don’t usually go listen to Dvorak or Brahms when they’re at summer camp, but I am excited for the opportunity, and I know the kids who go will love it. Whatever it is that makes music important to us as people, I know that the love and camaraderie it builds is a big part. There may be more skilled or trained musicians in Staunton this summer, but I think you might be hard pressed to find anyone who loves making music more than the people in this camp.