Week 1: Spotlight on "Milling and Seething"

Our first week of YSP is complete! This past week, Jaymes and I introduced activities in all four of our main areas of study--Communication/Voice, Movement, Improv, and Text--as well as introducing our campers to the plot and characters of As You Like It.

To give you a snapshot of one of our camp activities, I'll tell you a bit more about "milling and seething," which includes voice work, movement work, improv work, and a bit of text work. In "milling and seething," campers walk around the room as a group, trying to "balance the space,"or create an environment where everyone is evenly spaced around the room, while moving. We ask campers to pay attention to their walking, changing their speed, changing how they walk, and then imagining that they become different characters as they walk. Yesterday, we introduced phrases from the text of As You Like It and asked campers to imagine themselves as characters from the play, walking as those characters and saying those lines, while balancing the space. This way, campers use bits of text to inspire improvised movement imitations of characters, speaking Shakespeare's lines "in character" in accordance with their movement.

In preparation for this activity, Jaymes and I brought in two guest actors from Dartmouth College to put on an abridged (super-short) version of As You Like It for our campers. We are grateful to Diane and Sarah for their time and talent--putting on a Shakespearean comedy with four people in twenty minutes isn't as easy as it looks! We were glad to see in the post-performance Q+A that our campers were able to name the characters and their relationships and offer specific, crucial questions about the play's plot and its structure.

In short, Jaymes and I had a great first week! We look forward to moving into preparations for casting during the second week, as well as strengthening campers' voices, movement awareness, and ability to apply their imaginations immediately through text interpretation and improv. I'll write again next week with a snapshot of another activity to keep you up-to-date on our campers' accomplishments.

Best,
Laura