Dab, Slash, Flick: Laban Movement with Patrick Earl

“Movement, to me, is integral as an actor is concerned,” stated Patrick Earl at the beginning of his Laban workshop. Appropriately, movement education makes up a significant part of the ASC Theatre Camp’s agenda. But prior to Patrick’s workshop, Laban was foreign to many of the campers. All week, returning campers were able to answer the frequent question, “Wait, what is Laban exactly?” with a promise that Laban is transformative in how it helps an actor move and speak. Laban Movement Analysis is separated into three categories: time, weight of the movement, and the way you move through space. Time pertains to how quickly the movement occurs, the weight refers to the strength behind the action, and Laban defines manner in eight effort actions: press, punch, dab, flick, slash, wring, float, and glide.

Patrick began by having the campers walk and explore the space in a natural, personal manner. Then he introduced the first effort action, asking the campers to “float” without direction. As the campers floated listlessly around the room, he called out numbers that indicated pace, 1 being the most subdued float and 10 being the most heightened float. Eventually he asked the campers to add purpose and direction to their floats, changing the action completely. Through these alterations, the campers discovered the diversity of a simple float. Patrick proceeded to take the campers through the rest of the eight effort actions, constantly changing the intensity and speed on the 1-10 scale while adding and removing direction. During each new action, he’d ask the campers which Shakespeare character they would associate with the action. For example, the “flick” motion brings to mind Ariel or Puck, while the “wring” motion conjures Richard III.

Throughout the exercise, Patrick prompted the campers to think about how their bodies were making these motions and to be aware of what their bodies’ centers were doing at all times. Randomly he would call for a switch from whatever movement they were doing to their normal gaits, saying “Shake it off! Back to you.” By the end of the cycle, the campers were familiar with the general Laban structure and were ready to apply it to text.

Patrick explained that while Laban obviously aids the actor with his or her physical choices when forming a character, it can also be applied to vocal choices as well. To illustrate this, Patrick asked the campers chose between two short monologues, one being Romeo’s proclamation that banishment is worse than death, and the other Juliet’s plea to her mother to break her engagement to Paris. The campers walked around the room and read their monologues eight times, each time reading in the style of one of the eight different effort actions. This way they could see which parts of the monologue fit well with certain actions. The campers then chose four to five of the actions and incorporated these actions vocally into their text. For example, Romeo may start out with a slash, then move into a punch, a dab, a wring, and end with a glide.

Once the campers developed their monologues, they performed them individually for the group. Every camper had made completely different choices for where they applied actions. When a camper’s actions were too vague, Patrick asked him or her to do the physical action while reading, to remind the camper of the actions’ distinctiveness. With the physical action in mind, the camper would perform the monologue again with more success, winning applause from the group. The end product was eighteen incredibly specific monologues that offered wide range of interpretations of these two texts. Patrick provided the campers with a wonderful toolbox of actions to help inspire them when forming onstage personas.

--Emma Lo

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

Box-kicking with Bob Jones

Bob Jones, known around ASC Theatre Camp as a favorite lecturer for his wealth of wisdom, discussed the differences between voice and prose at his lecture on Wednesday.

Verse is a form of writing with a metrical rhythm and strict rules (which many writers, including Shakespeare, do not always follow precisely). Because of its beat-like flow, verse is generally much easier for the actor to memorize and also for the audience to remember. In Shakespeare’s day at a live, crowded theater like the Blackfriars Playhouse, some audience members would have trouble hearing all of what the actors were saying. The structure of verse emphasizes the most important words as stressed syllables, so even if only the stressed syllables are heard, the audience member would have a good grasp of what the actor was trying to communicate. For example, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” line without the unstressed syllables would read “be not be is quest”. Bob pointed out that those words alone are the meat of Hamlet’s entire speech, and essentially of the entire play.

To help the campers understand verse more fully, Bob got them on their feet for a physical exercise. First, he assigned every camper a line from a scene between Claudio and Don Pedro from Much Ado about Nothing. Bob instructed them to use scansion to determine which syllables were stressed and unstressed. “Now gallop your line!” Bob announced. Each camper tapped out the line according to the stressed and unstressed syllables. The campers with more irregular lines tripped a little on the way, but Bob helped everyone produce an accurate gallop by the end. Here are several examples Bob provided of regularities and irregularities in Shakespeare’s verse:

CLAUDIO
˅        /     ˅    /    ˅    /     ˅   /     ˅      /
Give not this rotten orange to your friend

This is an example of a regular verse line. It has ten syllables that alternate stressed and unstressed and it begins on an unstressed syllable.

HAMLET
˅   /   ˅    /   ˅   /    ˅     /   ˅     /     ˅
To be or not to be that is the question
You’ll notice that this line has an extra, unstressed syllable at its end, which is referred to as a “feminine ending”.

BEDFORD
 /        /   ˅      /      ˅     ˅        /       /      /    ˅      / 
Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

Here Shakespeare breaks all the rules of verse, using several “spondees,” or feet where both of the syllables are stressed. This irregularity in verse would catch the audience’s attention. In this case, the excess of stressed syllables make the line sound more powerful and reinforce the line’s meaning – but, you can see how this line would be difficult to gallop.

In contrast to verse, prose sounds much like how people converse today and has no complex stressed and unstressed structure. A King and No King, one of the three plays in Session 2, is written mostly in prose . While looking at an excerpt of text from this play, the campers noted that there are more punctuation marks, caesuras, and meter shifts than there typically are in Shakespeare’s text. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher wrote A King and No King during a period when the vogue in writing was moving from verse towards prose, and this play contributed to that transition. Here is an excerpt that when read aloud, sounds like every day speech. Bob noted that Shakespeare never ended a sentence after two syllables into a line, as Beaumont and Fletcher have done here with “So long.”

ARBACES
Bessus, go you along too with her. –I will prove
All this that I have said, if I may live
So long. But I am desperately sick,

After his overview of verse and prose, Bob covered the importance of the last word in a line. While the stressed syllables are more important that the unstressed, the last word in a line is the most important out of all of them. Bob brought out three mysterious white boxes and instructed the campers to choose a small section of their own lines to work on. Then he told them to recite their chosen text by walking during the line and turning abruptly on the last word before beginning the next line. When the campers had perfected their sharp turns, Bob added in the boxes. Now the campers gave the boxes a swift kick on the last word, an even more forceful movement than the turn. This exercise made the campers extremely conscious of putting emphasis on the final word. Bob explained that physicalizing this emphasis helps you to get vocal ideas, and can help you to give phrases weight. At the end of the lecture, Bob opened the white boxes to reveal that a Complete Works of Shakespeare had been hiding in each! The campers laughingly bemoaned the fact that they’d been abusing their idol for the last hour.

The campers left Bob’s lecture with more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher use verse and prose and of their purposeful switches between both throughout the plays. One of the most difficult challenges in performing Shakespeare and his contemporaries is deciphering the playwright’s intent that is hidden within the structure and then actually executing the iambic pentameter. Thanks to Bob, the campers are now prepared to attack their plays, galloping and kicking their way through tongue-tripping text.

--Emma  Lo

Music as Human Nature: Workshop with Greg Phelps

Greg Phelps began his Music Workshop with a nearly unanswerable question, “Why is there music?” But after pondering for a minute or two, the ASC Theatre Campers were full of answers for him. Campers began to list purposes for music, suggesting that music is way to express emotions and a way for humans to master the sounds they hear.

The conversation took on a free form, and Greg introduced other questions , such as “What is silence?” which had the campers debating the existence of silence altogether. Session 2 differs from Session 1 in many ways, and the difference in assertiveness and leadership was evident today. These older campers turned the “masterclass” into more of a seminar, where the class began to drive the conversation with their inquiries and inventive ideas. One camper mused that we as humans are both master and servant to noises, in that we have a natural inclination to control and organize these sounds, but also must use them for creation. Another pointed out that not only is music a way to express personal emotions, but it is a way to inspire emotion in others. An example a camper came up with is that in a movie, the soundtrack serves as a cue to the audience for what mood a scene is in.

Greg reinforced all the ideas that the campers brought up, offering support with anecdotes and related information. The general conclusion was that music is tied to the human race’s ability and will to create. Greg explained that “we’re still animals, but we can create. Birds know how to mimic other sounds, but to take ‘part a’ and ‘part q’ and put them together, that’s solely human. Nothing else does that. It sets us apart.”

The campers discovered that another singularly human aspect of music is its communal nature. Music brings people together so they can share a moment of collective emotion, sometimes simply just to have a good time. One camper pointed out that everyone has participated in a loud, rousing chorus of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” at one point or another. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t know all the words or if you’re completely tone deaf: There is something about singing in a large group of people that ties to the human need to belong and be accepted by fellow humans.

As the campers continued to explore these inventive theories for over an hour, Greg finally had to put a halt on Music Philosophy 101 so that the campers could unpack their instruments, warm up their voices, and start composing. Out of sea of black cases came a mandolin, many guitars, a bass, an Irish hand drum, two violins, and a trumpet. The campers received a variety of lyrics from different Shakespeare plays to choose from, and this group selected “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night to set to music. The room divided between singers and instrumentalists. Greg acted as a communicator between the two groups so that their independent work would match up when put together. First, the musicians came up with a basic chord progression which the singers then built a melody around. After establishing the basic structure, the piece blossomed with the addition of harmonies, embellishments, and instrumental solos. The group was lucky to have counselor and music major, Zach Fichter, along with dramaturg and violinist Clara Giebel to assist with the composition. In the end, the campers’ rendition of “O Mistress Mine” sounded professional, thanks to the talent of this group and Greg’s wonderful guidance. ASC Theatre Camp will most likely use the song for their pre-show.

Throughout the entire workshop, the campers had to actively say “yes” to the ideas of their peers in order to make this collaborative process happen. You’ll notice that this is a recurring theme that pops up in just about everything we do at this camp! The song would not have been nearly as complex or interesting without the positive reinforcement that the campers displayed. To emphasize the importance of positivity, Greg asked everyone to put their hands in middle and yell an enthusiastic “YES” to finish off the workshop. As the campers filed out of the room to head off to lunch, each was humming proudly the melody of their newly composed song.

--Emma Lo

Session 2 Auditions: Beatboxing and Knock-Knock Jokes

On the very first day of camp, auditions occur, the event that determines how the campers will be focusing their energies for the next three weeks. This exciting procedure took place in the black box, under the guidance of the counselors and the directors for this session, Daniel Kennedy (Much Ado about Nothing), Jeremy West (Henry VI Part 1), and Riley Steiner (A King and No King).
The counselors began auditions by teaching the campers a song. The song used the text of first verse from Shakespeare’s Cuckoo’s Song set to an Ingrid Michaelson melody.

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight

After using a call and response technique and once the campers had the song memorized, the counselors led everyone in a round. The campers then divided into groups of three and made the song their own by choreographing dance moves, overlapping voices, and using acrobatics. Several groups funkified the song with beatboxing and rap. This was a way for the auditionees to show their music skills, abilities to work with others, and spontaneous creativity.

Next, the campers divided into three large groups of twelve to create a series of tableaux. Each group had a set of lines from one of the plays to act out. For each line, the group would form a different stage picture, using contrasting levels, stances, and facial expressions to enhance the text. The groups also had special rules that they had to incorporate into their tableaux. For example, on a certain line, everyone has to faint. On another, everyone is surprised except for one individual, and there must be a passionate relationship. As campers called out ideas for these stage pictures, the counselors reminded them to “Yes, and” each other, meaning to stay positive about others’ choices and to build on those choices.

Before Session 2 began, the campers were to select and prepare a ten line monologue from one of the three plays. In performing a monologue, the camper gets to showcase his or her individual talent. The campers took turns performing their pieces to the directors and their fellow campers. It was wonderful to see how supportive these campers already are of each other, even though they are technically in competition with one another during the auditions. At the end of each monologue there was an explosion of clapping and cheers for the auditioning camper.

Auditions are tough, which makes Day 1 arguably the most stressful and nerve-wracking day of the session. The directors recognized this and tried to reassure the campers throughout the auditions, telling them not to hold anything back and to have fun. Daniel Kennedy provided a final stress-reliever to culminate auditions by asking the campers to share a joke with everyone. Tension began to leave the room as campers ecstatically ran to the front of the room, eager to make their peers laugh. The audition process is now over and the shows are cast, but the talent, energy, and excitement the campers displayed at auditions are here to stay. Whether in the dorm, in rehearsal, or at workshops, these campers of ASC Theatre Camp Session 2 are full of life and a passion for theater!

--Emma Lo