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.