Auditions and Dramaturgy

Hello! This is Clara Giebel, back again for another summer of blogging about the ASC Theatre Camps. We’re only a couple days in, and already we have settled ourselves into Mary Baldwin College campus, climbed hundreds of stairs, laughed, smiled, made new friends, and caught up with friends from the past. Additionally, we have made it through auditions, casting, and our first read-through of the plays, all with much laughter and enthusiasm. 


I love auditions in this camp because they overflow with trust, love, and potential. Monday morning we opened with Symmonie Preston, our new Director of College Prep Programs,  leading the campers to give and receive their trust to each other. Standing in a circle, the campers and all the staff promised to each other, “If you fall I will catch you.” Rather than beginning with aggressiveness or vicious competition, we started with trust and went from there. The audition progressed from trust to love, as the counselors taught all the campers a musical round to the words of Hamlet’s poem,

Doubt thou the stars are fire,

Doubt thou the sun doth move,

Doubt truth to be a liar

But never doubt I love.

Once they’d learned the song, the campers broke into little groups of three or four, then each group performed the song with their own interpretation. One trio meowed their song instead of singing it. One trio impersonated Charlie’s Angels. One trio made their song into a story of rejected love. Other groups choreographed dance moves or broke into harmony. We heard the same song at least fifteen times, and I don’t think any of us watching had any opportunity to get bored. 

After the song, the campers did a series of movement centered performances based off of some lines of each of the three plays, and finally all the campers performed their ten lines of prepared text. It is such a privilege to be in a room surrounded by young people who are just brimming with enthusiasm for Shakespeare and his language. We are all flying on potential at this point in the camp, imagining the fantastic things that these young people will achieve, readying ourselves for the work ahead to make the ideas come true. 

Before I leave off for today, I wanted to answer some possible queries about the dramaturgy of this camp. The difficulty in explaining “dramaturgy” lies in the abundance of definitions. For an exuberant list of some possible answers to the question, “what is dramaturgy?” you can explore the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (LMDA) website: http://www.lmda.org/what-dramaturgy-few-possibilities. Usually, a dramaturg assists a production by doing research so that the the actors and directors have a strong foundation in the text and context of the play. For our camps, the dramaturgs gloss (add in the footnotes for) our cut scripts, put together a binder full of pictures and historical backgrounds, provide some literary analysis of the plays, and attend the rehearsals to stay right in the middle of the action. 

That’s all for now, but please keep checking back for more throughout the week. Our regular schedule begins on Tuesday!