This week we did not meet with our group as we had fall break. A part of me wishes we had met because I am unsure how this is going to go going forward. They enjoy the improv games, which is great, however once we get them going on those it is difficult to reign them in. I wonder if we should use the improv games as a reward. I don’t think candy is the answer considering they usually are already hyped up for some reason, I wish I had their energy. I think we will try to have them read lines while running, or have them run around for 10 or so minutes so that they can get it out of their systems. Also, this week we saw 1776 as a class. I know what you’re thinking, where is she going with this, but believe me, I have a point. In regards to 1776 I think it was interesting how much the geography impacted he performance. I wonder how the geography or social/cultural climate will affect ours. Although we already have a prop list, I hope that next class we can choose a setting (time and place) and consequently be able to get a costume list started.

Unfortunately I was unable to go to Henderson this past time because of my fall break flight, however I heard from Maren that the kids had a positive reaction to changing spaces. We needed this change because in the main room the noise reverberates all over and it was hard to say things and have the kids listen. I drew a love triangle last time and Maren said this strategy helped the kids a lot so we will continue to draw plot points that are more difficult to understand. The kids are mostly excited about having parts in the play. I am excited to go back and see them this week, as I am also thinking about my paper on twelfth night, I am realizing new things to go over with the kids and other ways to explain plot points.

Sarah

On Thursday (10/6), we had our first meeting with the kids.  We introduced ourselves, and gave them a general overview of what we will be doing together over the next couple months.  Our group this week consisted of one student from Brook Road Academy and three students from the Dooley Center for Alternative Education. None of the students have any prior experience with Shakespeare. We assured them that no one would have to memorize any lines.  Our first student seemed eager and excited, and he even offered to try memorizing his part.  We decided to show them the trailer to She’s the Man so they could visualize the plot of the play in a modern context.  Then we played a series of improv / warm up games (the adjective-name game, zip zap zop, “3, 6, 9,” and the number count off game).  Initially, the students were visibly reluctant, but I could see the group’s barriers slowly breaking down as we played each game and I think they actually had some fun.  After this first meeting, I definitely understand the importance of these games to get everyone laughing and comfortable, so the group will trust us and want to work with us.  I think we will try to play at least one or two new games in the beginning of each rehearsal to remind the kids that this will be a fun experience.  We plan to introduce the script and more details about our specific act of the play next rehearsal.

On Thursday (9/29), we did not meet with the kids due to another conflict.  We look forward to meeting them next Thursday. We plan to introduce Twelfth Night and play some improv games.

“Is it a world to hide virtues in?” – Sir Toby Belch (Act I, Scene I, Line 131)

I hate to toot my own horn but TOOT TOOT readers because my last rehearsal at Henderson was AWESOME.

First and foremost, we have our own rehearsal space now!

We have the whole choir room to ourselves so not only is it quiet, but there’s also a ton of room and a whiteboard to boot.

I wonder if this is how Shakespeare would have felt if he somehow managed to get a rehearsal space without, I don’t know, rats or something.

Other highlights include our troupe wanting to play the animal charade game again and being open to playing a quick round of Simon Says while I waited on a student to find me some whiteboard markers.

I had them just play the basic way but maybe in the future there’s a way I can Shakespeare it up a bit – director says perhaps?

Anyways, we appeared to have a large portion of the same people we had our first week, with only one to two new additions.

Since my partners were unable to make the rehearsal I decided to dedicate the day to explain the plot again – I had hoped it would make more sense now that they could actually hear me, and I could use the board to draw basic images and whatnot.

The second attempt to explain went wayyy better than the first, and it was actually really fun seeing them react to the complicated yet funny love triangles and other various parts of the show.

Some of their amusement was probably also caused by the fact that I kept accidentally calling “Duke Orsino” “Dork Orsino,” which while technically not his name, isn’t completely off the mark either.

I also went ahead and started tentatively casting the show after wrapping up the story explanation and am very satisfied with how that went too.

Most of the parts were happily selected by the players on their own – our adorable fifth grader is so thrilled to be playing the “captain,” and I’m really excited about our Feste too.

We hit one little snag when two of the girls wanted to play Viola, but they ended it up working it out so that one would play Mary and the other Viola, completely on their own, even though I offered various alternatives of splitting the part.

The only snag we hit with casting is that we’ve yet to cast Malvolio, Sir Toby, or Sir Andrew, and unless we have a dramatic fluctuation in numbers this week, myself and my fellow directors may be breaking out our own acting skills come December.

Although we have at least one girl who at first couldn’t seem to care less about the show and didn’t want a part at all, she seemed genuinely interested in helping with costumes, scenery, and such when I offered that option to her, so I’ll have to be conscious of finding ways of including her in that process as we move along.

I’ve also had the students make themselves name-tags so hopefully in the future I can start getting better with names, although for ease and privacy I will simply refer to any students by their character name from now on.

This coming week will be the first time they actually get to see and read through their scripts so I imagine new hurdles will appearing in the blogs to come, but for now I can’t imagine another way I’d rather be spending my Thursday nights.

I decided to follow Jacob’s lead and combine last week’s (10/3) and this week’s (10/10) blog post into one. We were unable to meet for our third rehearsal, since Maddie is our designated driver and she had a scheduling conflict. Since the shuttle times didn’t match up with our rehearsal times and neither me nor Jacob can drive, we decided to postpone rehearsal until the next time we would meet. Unfortunately, with our fourth rehearsal falling during fall break, this meant our next meeting would be on October 17^th. I’m a little concerned that since last rehearsal wasn’t as exciting for the kids (since we focused less on games and more on the script) and since it will have been so long since we held a rehearsal, that a lot of our cast members won’t come back. Timone seemed to really like the program, however, so hopefully he’ll encourage them to show up on Monday. As for planning our next rehearsal, we decided to go over the script more in depth and practice reading Shakespeare more. We went through the whole script and “translated” it into modern English so we would have descriptions ready if the high schoolers were confused on what was happening during a certain scene. We also left the group with a “homework” assignment for the next rehearsal. We wanted them to watch She’s the Man, which they all seemed fairly excited about, and read over the script. My group and I worked more on a props and costumes list, which we will hopefully solidify more next week. As for Monday, I think our goals would be to cast the play, determine if the group wanted to use a creative twist (by making in modern, set in another era, etc.), and figure out what we’re doing about Feste’s songs. I also think we should try to incorporate more games into the rehearsal if we have time, because it seemed to let them burn their excess energy and focus better later on.

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(Since we could not rehearse both 10/3 and 10/10, I am combining both rehearsal days into one blog post. I hope this is okay. I just assumed it was better, because two separate ones would just look exactly the same)

Last Monday (10/3), we were unable to meet with our students because Maddie had a conflict, and she was our designated driver (Natalie and I had no way to get there). Today (10/10), it is fall break, so no rehearsal for us.

I guess my biggest concern is who will show up next Monday. It will have been three weeks since we saw them. Will people not show up? Will the initial interest they had fade away? And for the people that do show up, will they be as excited or ready to work as they were during the first rehearsals?

We are remaining optimistic, however. We had 3 of our first 5 come back last rehearsal, with promises that the other 2 would as well, and we had 2 new people at our last rehearsal. We’ll make it work! We’ll play some theatre games to get people excited about the project again!

When it comes to plans for our next rehearsal, we want to make sure that we cast the play. It is time to start working on our scenes. We will cast whomever is there, and we will talk with them about what parts they want/how many lines they want. But we have to make sure that gets done.

Then, once we’ve casted the play, we should read through the script so everyone can start getting a feel for their lines. We can also start offering our brief modernized explanations of what is going on in each scene and exchange.

I think we have a great rehearsal planned, given that our goal is to get people interested and excited again in Twelfth Night. I just hope it works out!

This week at Youthlife was by far our most challenging. Upon arriving at the cite, we learned that we once again only had three of our five students available for rehearsal. I hope that attendance does not become an issue with the other two students, however, given how much time we have until the play we still have plenty of time to make up lost ground with the absent students. Our first challenge today was with Adrian, our “star” student. Adrian has thus far been the most enthusiastic, and knowledgable student in our class and we currently have him playing Duke Orsino today in Act V. However, last Thursday, Adrian got in trouble with one of the supervisors at Youthlife and for the first 30 minutes of rehearsal was in time-out. In addition, upon returning, Adrian was in a horrible mood and was in no way willing to listen to TJ or myself, or act to the natural ability that we know he has. This really set us back as Adrian is usually the one who keeps the other students on track with the performance and motivates them to do as well as himself.

In addition, we also lost Khalil who will be playing Antonio, for the first half of our rehearsal because he had to finish an online reading test. As a result of Khalil and Adrian being absent for the first half of our session, we only had one student who will be playing Olivia in the performance. It was extremely difficult for TJ and myself to motivate Jeniyah to perform when “no one else had to”. To keep her on topic, and to keep the session productive, TJ and I decided to play all of the other roles surrounding Olivia (Jeniyah’s character). This worked fairly well, however, it did also have its challenges as it was not the same as having all three students act together. One final challenge we faced this week was keeping all of the students on track when they are together. They really like to sing and dance when they are not performing, so in order to capitalize on this TJ and I assigned them to come up with a rap to Feste’s song for next week. We hope that this will help to motivate the students even further by giving them flexibility and independence, and help to align their interests with Shakespeare. Despite the challenges this week at Youthlife, I am optimistic as to what next week has in store.

Finally, after our third scheduled week of meeting at St. Joseph’s Villa, we got to meet with our kids. We had 4 students, two of them are also in Act IV with the other group, Javon and Aisha. We also had two new students, Charles and Destiny. Eliza was unable to make it on Thursday due to fall break travel plans, so Lexi and I arrived looking for Timone, but were unable to find him. When we eventually contacted him, and he told us that he was trying to finish taking care of some incident from earlier in the day (not an unusual occurrence at the Villa). At first I thought this was bound to be another disastrous trip, resulting in having to come back next week, still standing at square 1. Although we did not get started until about a half hour into our scheduled time slot, and we didn’t get to use the chapel space that I thought we would, the small room we did get worked out fine for our 4 players, and the day was successful.

We started off by introducing ourselves and describing the goal of our class to put on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Just to familiarize them with the plot without overwhelming them, we showed them the trailer to She’s the Man, and Destiny said she had seen it before. To get everyone acquainted, since Charles and the other three students had never met, and to help Lexi and me with names, we played the classic orientation name game where you have to say your name preceded by an adjective that starts with the same letter (e.g. Magical Matt). As you go around the room, you have to also say everyone else’s name before saying your own, to test your memory. This worked well for all of us except Javon, who seemed disinterested and did not want to give us an adjective for his name. We moved on to play a couple more games, including zip zap zop, and a number game where you had to go around in a circle counting upwards, but could only clap and remain silent when the numbers 3, 6, and 9 came up. By the end, everyone was having a good time, including Javon, who had broken out of his shell in the 20 minutes we were able to play some games.

Lexi and I had originally planned on going over the plot of Twelfth Night a little bit with them, and starting to describe some of the characters so that they could have some time to think about the roles, but the late start this week limited our options. All in all it was a good day, and I am excited to see Charles, Aisha, Destiny, and Javon act when the time comes.