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

YSP 2014 Begins Today

Today's the big day--YSP 2014 begins at 2pm! Jaymes and I are excited to meet our 2014 campers and jump right into activities in our four main areas of study: Voice/Communication, Text, Movement, and Improv. Today's workshop will give our campers a sampling of several of the games we'll play over the course of the project to build theatrical skills as we build our theatrical community. We can't wait to get started!

If you haven't signed up for YSP and are thinking of walking in, please register ahead of time. We will close registration at midnight tonight. We are very close to our enrollment limit and cannot accept many more campers, so it's very important for us to have a list of prospective campers in sign-up order. Our first-come, first-served policy follows the order in which we receive online enrollments.

Campers who are enrolled--congratulations, and we're glad to have you with us. You are the stars of our 2014 season, and Jaymes and I look forward to meeting you today!

Best,
Laura

Laura Neill and Jaymes Sanchez
Co-directors, Youth Shakespeare Project
youthshakespeareproject@gmail.com

YSP 2014

Dear parents, students, and friends,

Hello, and welcome! The Youth Shakespeare Project is a free summer theater program based in Hanover, NH. The program accepts campers ages 11 to 17 and is open to students from families of all income levels. Our curriculum includes text study, theater games, vocal exercises, movement activities, and scene rehearsal, which will lead up to the kids' production of Shakespeare's As You Like It.

YSP will meet from June 26, 2014 to July 31, 2014, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 2-5pm (with some exceptions; to see the calendar, click here). We will meet at the Howe Library in Hanover. Many thanks to the Howe for allowing us to use the space!

To REGISTER for YSP 2014, click here. The first twenty students to register will be accepted. Students who can commit to attending 18 out of our 21 meetings (including the full last week of camp) will receive priority. Please be aware that we are approaching our enrollment cap; after you fill out the registration form, you will receive an email within a day letting you know if you were one of the first twenty registrations or not.

Thank you for your interest and support, and we hope to see you this summer!

Best,
Laura and Jaymes

Laura Neill and Jaymes Sanchez
Co-directors, Youth Shakespeare Project
Brown University M.A.T. Class of 2014
Dartmouth College Class of 2013
youthshakespeareproject@gmail.com
(210) 744-6641

Reflections on the 2012 YSP

Here are a few reflections from our 2012 campers! We are very proud of them.

"My time at the Youth Shakespeare Project was a fun experience. I learned a lot about acting through the fun activities we did. The other kids there were nice and great to work with. I didn't know a lot of the kids but I got to know all of them in the first week.

            I was nervous at first but after some time, I became really comfortable. I really enjoyed our first day and decided that I wanted to continue to participate in this camp. Our teachers, Laura and Jaymes, were really nice to me. They were always cheerful and encouraging.  Each day, we did warm-up’s first by doing some stretches. After stretches, Jaymes led us in some vocal warm-up’s. We would do some tongue twisters every day. Everybody got better at the tongue twisters as we practiced them.

            I had a lot of fun with all the other kids. I’m sad that it ended because I wanted to go back for more learning and having fun. I definitely plan on participating again next year and look forward to another great time."

-Joe, 13

"I think the Youth Shakespeare Project was good because it gave my summer some structure, and going to learn about Shakespeare is better than just sitting home and watching TV. (Not that that's what I'd do or anything.)  Also Laura and Jaymes did a good job thinking of games that helped us learn to project and enunciate. I learned a little bit about acting and how a play is really put together. I think Laura and Jaymes chose the parts well, and i feel that Puck was the part I would have played best. I liked playing Puck because he's younger than most of the other characters, and I always imagine him as a kid, sort of like me. I hope to do it next summer. And if they do "Midsummer Night's Dream" again, I'd like to be Hermia. I'd like Hermia because she's older and more mature as a character than Puck (even though she's young to be getting married). She's one of the main characters, and I like her better than Helena, because Helena is sort of soppy and tells Demetrius about Hermia and Lysander running away. 

I also liked working with all the other kids, especially since most of them were a lot older than me. You don't usually get to work with people who are older, and most plays I'm in, everyone's the same age. But with older people, it feels more like a real play because the older people play the older parts. When everyone's the same age, you have to cast people who aren't really suited to the part. Parts like Hippolyta and the Rude Mechanicals had an even harder time changing in and out of costumes and learning two parts.

 It felt like a real play because we had a big theater with a lot of chairs and spotlights, and a backstage and curtains. We didn't really have a lot of scenery, so we had to improvise and make it seem like we were in the forest or the court, when we only had a bunch of chairs. Even without the scenery, it really felt like we were there."

-Rosa, 11

For at least six weeks, I practiced acting out the part of "Bottom", from a Midsummer's Night Dream. To me, it was tedious trying to learn my lines (according to the counselors, I had the most), but they made it fun by several games we played, one of which was "Hep", which was my favorite. I made friends with several kids in the group, including Eli, Garret, and Joe. I don't exactly remember being nervous for the actual play, until I had a malfunction with one of my donkey ears during rehearsal. Overall, I surprisingly enjoyed my experience there, and I may join again next year. 

-Henry, 15

SHOW FRIDAY

The Youth Shakespeare Project presents...
The Summer 2012 YSP campers in...

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

FRIDAY, AUGUST 6
7PM
Dartmouth Hall 105
Hanover, NH

***Free admission***

Sponsored by the Winthrop Bean Fund for Theatre Arts
Thanks to the Howe Library and the Tucker Foundation for their support!

Halfway through the Program

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

About

Welcome to the Youth Shakespeare Project!

Registration for our 2012 session is now CLOSED. Registration for our 2013 session will open in March of next year.

This is a six-week, free summer theater program for kids between the ages of 11 and 17, running in its first season from July 5, 2012 to August 10, 2012. The Project is run by students from Dartmouth College and consists of rehearsals, textual work, communication exercises, movement, acting training, theater games, vocal training, and theater education. Our summer's rehearsals will conclude with a performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream on August 10!

The Project, which is graciously sponsored by the Winthrop Bean Fund for Theatre Arts, is completely free. All children between the ages of 11 and 17 are welcome, regardless of economic background. Participants who do not have access to private transportation will be picked up at the Advanced Transit stop in Hanover upon request.

Rehearsals will run from 2-5pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, beginning on July 5, and will be held at the Howe Library in Hanover, NH. Many thanks to the Howe for letting us use the space!

Please click through the pages above to learn more, or contact us at youthshakespeareproject@gmail.com.

Sincerely,
Laura Neill and Jaymes Sanchez, co-directors
Dartmouth College Class of 2013