The 2012 Youth Shakespeare Project is in full swing! Our twenty participants are brilliant children from all over the Upper Valley, ranging in age from ten to just-turned-seventeen. We are incredibly lucky to have such amazing campers to work with, and we are looking forward to a fantastic show (an abridged version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) on August 10.
For the past two and a half weeks, we have been teaching our participants the basics of theater and acting, focussing on the four main areas of Voice/Communication, Movement, Text, and Improv. In our Voice sections, we work with the kids on projection, enunciation, breath support, speaking clearly and comprehensibly, and utilizing their voices correctly so as to speak well and not hurt their vocal cords or throats. As for Movement, we've been providing opportunities for the kids to express themselves and communicate through movement as well as with words. We first teach them how to take care of their bodies with stretches and warm-ups and then lead them in activities as varied as formal choreography and sculpture tag (which they've taken a particular liking to). We merge formal movement exercises with games to both educate and entertain so that our lessons are both memorable and fun. We address Text by talking through our script of A Midsummer Night's Dream, working with both small excerpts and vocabulary as well as the script as a whole. We emphasize text comprehension as well as different modes of expressing the text through summarizing, acting, "translating" into modern English, and structured improv. Our Improv sections contain both "free" improv (where the kids are given a prompt and asked to imagine their scene on the spot) and more structured improvisational workshops in which the kids improv interactions between their characters and scenes from Midsummer (in modern English).
We are currently immersed in "table work," which is the beginning of the formal rehearsal process and involves text comprehension and discovery of character motivations and relationships. The show is completely cast and the kids are learning about their individual characters and how those characters react to the situations in the play, as well as exploring Shakespeare's language and how it relates to modern English.
We will begin "blocking" (putting actors on their feet) this week, which promises to challenge our kids to put what they have learned about acting into practice! Everyone is very excited about rehearsal and it is genuinely wonderful to see how much these incredibly intelligent young people have learned in such a short time. We are very proud of them!
The Youth Shakespeare Project's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is on August 10 at 7pm, location TBA. We hope you will attend and support Upper Valley youth!
Best,
Laura
Co-directors Jaymes Sanchez and Laura Neill
youthshakespeareproject@gmail.com
(210) 744-6641
