Text and Silence

In camp the days are long and full, but the weeks are short. I’m back again to write about some of the joys of the end of our first week, but expect more posts quite soon. This post will give you a peek into Thursday and Friday morning of this past week, and it will also give you a chance to see some of the spectrum of work we accomplish in this camp; how we tell stories with our bodies and with our words onstage, and how closely those two things are connected.

Thursday morning, Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen, Co-founder and Director of Mission of the American Shakespeare Center, came to talk with all the campers. He began his lecture by getting to know the campers, asking who they are, where they’re from, remembering the past roles of the returning campers, and welcoming them to Staunton. His lecture focused on scansion and rhetoric, the nuts and bolts of Shakespeare’s text, so he taught about how exciting iambic pentameter can be if you take advantage of all the head starts Shakespeare gives you in the way he wrote his lines. With the students up out of their seats and into a row showing the syllables of a line of text, he had them stand or sit as they spoke the appropriate stressed or unstressed syllables. We started by examining some famous examples, “To be or not to be that is the question” or “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” and then the campers started calling out lines of their own. Mari, playing Tybalt, suggested, “What art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?” and from that place we started to talk about Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting, and Cohen coached Jon and Aubrey through those lines. In the middle of a rowdy party, Romeo and Juliet make poetry together. In Shakespeare’s words, we can follow not only as the two young lovers hold each other’s hands and kiss but as they get into each other’s rhyme scheme, into each other’s quatrains and finally into each other’s lines.

Cohen also shared some ideas for perform rhyme, asking the campers who has a rhyme they’d like to share, and Madison, jumped in with “I'll do my best/To woo your lady: yet, a barful strife!/Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife.” Instead of trying to mask the awkwardness of a sudden rhyme in lines which hadn’t rhymed until this point, Cohen gives the analogy of tossing up a baseball for yourself to hit. Throw your first rhyming word up so the audience can notice it, and send it home with the second rhyming word.

The last section of the lecture was on figures of speech and Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric. We delved into questions of what ways do different people talk? What does it mean for Kings to aggrandize themselves by using more words than necessary? What does it mean when characters chop words out of their sentences rather than speaking every word in full? What about characters that change the order of sentences? What does Yoda accomplish by saying the ends of his sentences before the beginnings?

When Cohen lectures, he always encourages the students to think more, look for more, find more in the performance of text. In Tom Dumontier’s workshop on neutral mask, the campers were expanding other boundaries in their imaginations, as Tom asked them again to see not what they could add, but what they could take away from their silent performances.

Working with masks can be very emotional business, as many of the campers noted in the times of reflection, “everyone wears masks, all the time, so sometimes wearing an actual mask can give you a lot of freedom. You can be anyone, or do anything and no one will judge.” This workshop is riveting to watch, as acting alone or in small groups, Tom led the campers through different exercises. Some exercises were very simple, (walk up, sit in the chair, walk back) and some were grand adventures involving fire and mountains and deserts and seas, all experiences from a base of neutrality. How would you behave neutrally if fire raged around you? If you were a robot? If you were a pregnant woman? Always the emphasis is learning from the inside out. What goes on inside you under the blank face? Where can you find stillness? How still can you be? For how long? How does that affect the people around you?

The last part of the workshop was set to music, many different types of music played immediately after each other, and every camper moved in a part of a large group improvisation. Some danced. Some crouched. Some claimed the sun as their own. Some played guitars in the slowest of slow motion. Some moved through yoga poses. Some faced each other and sized each other up. Some moved off of each other’s movements. Some stared off in perfect stillness gazing into the future and the past.

To me, it seemed that the scansion and rhetoric lecture and the neutral mask workshop were perfectly paired. They both focused on specificity, and making use of the tools available to you in performance, be that your own body and memory or Shakespeare’s craft of words. They stretched these young actors’ capabilities and challenged them to challenge themselves. Both classes equipped the students to be better actors, in speech and silence.

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!