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. 

Moving Freely

            The workshops held at ASC Theatre Camp  aim to instill a wide variety of skills that are applicable to the performance and understanding of early modern text. Denice Mahler’s dance workshop got the campers working actively on their feet and interacting with the performance space and with each other.  Mahler implemented Anne Bogart’s “Viewpoints” method that provides a concrete way for discussing and acting on movement and gesture. The workshop challenged campers' comfort zones and implemented non-verbal communication, the result of which was a good, clean sweat for all involved.

            We were first charged with moving around the space. What was at first a simple task graduated in complexity, adding new challenges. First, we worked with different levels of speed. Sometimes half of the group worked at minimal speed while others raced about them. It was difficult to control one’s own motions while being aware of those of others, especially when the others were racing about them. The next challenge was moving in a certain pattern. We’d either move in a circular pattern or set to a grid. In doing so, the campers discovered new things about the space. During the group discussion, Marianna Moynihan said that being confined to walking on a grid made her realize the grid like pattern on the ceiling of the space, which she used to guide her movement. Many of the campers claimed that they reacted in a similar fashion: taking cues from the space to guide their action.

            At this point, Mahler added music to the mix. The music ranged from dubstep to smooth jazz to upbeat pop. The result was impressive. As Mahler fed us different directions for how to interact with the space, it became apparent that most of the campers lost any inhibitions about movement that they may have had. Keeping with the idea of making some motions bigger and interacting with the space, action was assigned to one body part, and we would explore out ability to translate it to another body part. The general consensus of the group was that we discovered and worked new muscles that we didn’t know we had!

            When working “freely,” patterns began to take shape. Mahler would gently suggest ways to move: using different levels, speeds, mimicking, etc. What was truly wonderful to see, however, was how relationships began to develop on their own. These exercises were non-verbal, but the campers took the initiative and acted out a variety of motions. Some created characters based on an exaggerated motion. Others worked with space, forming shapes around the scene created by another camper. Many mimicked the motion of another camper, and they were able to move around each others' empty space without verbal communication. The energy and emotion during this exercise was thrilling to witness. Each movement that the campers would go through very much retained their own personal character, but the fluidity of action and variation in movement was astonishing.

            After a brief and well-earned water break, we began a new group exercise. Walking in a circle, we were made to jump on the count of three. The goal of this exercise was to land at the same time and as soundlessly as possible. When we had completed this task, we were made to do it again without being prompted by Mahler’s counting. After a few unsuccessful attempts, we were able to all jump and land as a group at the same time without any verbal communication whatsoever.

            Our final exercise for the dance workshop was to create a series of five tableaus, or still images, to present to the group. We divided up into groups of four and picked a fairy tale that the group would then have to guess. These tableaus were silent and still with only actions to hint at what fairy tale it was to the audience. The viewpoints exercises that addressed shape came in handy here, since the campers had to become scenery as well as characters. In one group, we saw campers become a fire, a ship, and a crocodile in their series of images. Despite the fact that the workshop was tiring and intense, the general consensus was that the two hour long workshop flew by. 

Madeleine M. Oulevey

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