As I again forgot to journal last week’s encounter, I will do my best to summarize both weeks in this post.

Last week all three mentors were there for the first time in a while. The group was still not solidified, since a couple of people whom were expected to be there either were not at school or again decided they did not want to participate. Nevertheless, we got through the script. Yet when the students heard that other public school students would be at the performance, they were actually quite a bit apprehensive. You could tell they were not comfortable being around kids that do not go to their school I hope that their confidence does not wane. The diction is still hard for almost all of the students. Most of them truly struggle just paying attention and following their lines. As we continue to get closer, I hope that the enthusiasm that they so often show will be just as strong as when they are in front of complete strangers. Haley however was not as helpful. During our read through she distracted the students. I just hope she will be able to assist with keeping the students focus. Of course the news then broke that she was no longer with St. Josephs.

When hearing Haley was not going to be assisting anymore, I was extremely worried about who would the contact. Yet she still texted to confirm that we would be coming. Apparently, it is her intention to be there until the project is over. To some degree this is important to hear. On the other end, this is problematic because she is no longer a staff member. This caused a few issues at the end of rehearsal on Thursday. We tried to act out the first scene and a half, but the kids really just could not stay controlled. Haley does not seem to have the authority anymore and the two faculty with us were rather disinterested. Haley did say that they would have transportation and she would contact me with the person who would be the new contact. As the weeks go by, it is becoming clearer that this will be an interesting event to put on. The acting aside, the students may have a tough time with this if focus cannot be assumed by them and their faculty advisor.

After our surprising night off last week, we had a pretty successful night at Higher Achievement this week! We started off the night by breaking up into our new three groups, based chronologically on the events in Act I. I was in charge of the first three pages of Act I, which consisted of the characters Theseus, Hippolyta, Egeus, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander. The first time we sat in a circle around a table and practiced the lines sitting down. For some reason the classroom has chairs with wheels on them so the children had a pretty difficult time focusing and kept wheeling around everywhere. While it was pretty difficult to keep them calm and still, they were pretty successful at reading their lines. I then had my group practice their lines once again standing up, as if they were actually performing. I gave them advice such as not holding the script in front of their face and to make sure they are loud enough for the audience to hear. Once the kids stood up and performed their lines they got significantly more into it. For example, one of the kids was walking back and forth in the front of the classroom, acting as if it was the stage. He was also using hand and body gestures which I found incredibly amusing.

We ended the rehearsal by playing a tongue twister game which the children really enjoyed. I just looked up tongue twisters on my phone and would have the kids go in a line and repeat the ones I said. It eventually escalated into all the kids competing to see who can see it correctly the fastest. We had a bunch of rounds and then a championship round between the two best. The winner got to take home one of the JSP posters we brought. The kids had a lot of fun with this game and they were also really impressed with the posters, so we’ll be sure to bring more next week! We also gave a few posters to the organizers so they could hang them around the school. The kids are getting more and more excited each week to come to our school and keep asking if their parents can come. They have gotten really into the play which is really cool to see and I’m excited to go back next week for one of our final rehearsals before showtime!

Today was a little different than the rest of the sessions. The star actress herself aka Sheryl was not there. So considering she’s about 75% of our act we had to make due without her parts. We actually all just played at least 2 roles and it worked out great. John who has only attended once let us know he may not be there for the performance, but we told him it won’t be a problem as we have many actors willing to take on another role! We worked on a little bit of staging where the audience will be and where people will die and when they get up and go off stage. All that type of stuff! It worked out well even though Thisbee would be dead then be Puck right after haha

Also, we worked on where the moon should stand as well with the wall. When actors should approach the wall and which side they should stand on. But don’t worry Sheryl will be back in action next week and we can continue our further development.

Last week was a really great rehearsal. We went over our lines twice and practiced staging. We had the idea that before Puck’s big speech at the end to bring all the actors from Act 5 out on stage and make them all fairies flying in the background. We also had the idea to bring all the kids out from all the other acts and anyone else who participated in the production. This means that Sheryl will have to wait a few minutes to get everyone on stage. We also had a lot of fun with the costumes. Sheryl has a lot of props and costumes. We have a few crowns, a mantel which were planning on coloring with red sharpie during the actual play. We have lion ears but are trying to invest in a better pair. They look a little mouse like and not a big scary lion. Also, we have a great wall costume and a plastic knife. It looks pretty real though! So were doing pretty well in that aspect!

Our most enthusiastic, and focused cast member was sick today, leading to a different atmosphere at rehearsal.  The three of us that were there a few minutes early had a discussion about different majors at UR and I got to learn a little about their lives which was fun.  The cast member who was dealing with a family emergency last week was back this week, however, he informed us that his participation may be limited due to his son being in critical care in the advanced stages of a terminal illness.  Hopefully he will be with us on the day of the performance, but we have a backup plan if need be.  We went through the play with the people present, and then talked about logistics.  I told them that the idea of having the kids come on stage before Puck’s final speech would have to be flexible, seeing as we don’t know how squirmy and out of control the other groups will be.  To that they jokingly said they were grateful I had confidence in their ability to behave themselves…   We also talked about the possibility of filling in for Act 4 if need be, which they were all happy to do.  To that effect I told them I would bring at least one copy of that groups script so we could go over it next week.  We decided that even if we don’t end up needing to fill roles it would still be a great opportunity to understand more of the play and get to know our characters.  We look forward to next weeks rehearsal which will be our second to last time together before the performance.

We had break until Wednesday, so we were unable to meet with the students at John Marshall. We reminded Laura that we would not be seeing the students then. While on break, we each thought about how the act would be performed. I thought a lot about the props that we would need and how to incorporate a lot of humour into the practice. Wehave constantly reminded the students that this project is really dependent on what they would like to add. We have been trying to pay close attention to the details in the text for how the movements could be portrayed. We thought about how stage directions could enhance the comedy in the play. Molly, Taylor, and I thought about each character and their motivations. We brainstormed how these characters could represent their stories through inflection and stage directions. We have given a lot of thought about how we want the act to look but we also have had a lot of flexibility in order to incorporate the student’s interests. We want the project to be extremely successful and we want students to start moving around! In general, we have not assigned roles yet (because we are unsure of how many students will attend). We want to begin blocking, we hope that we will have enough students.

October 12th Post

On Monday, Molly, Taylor, and I went to  John Marshall High School for the second time. The first time, we had a good number of students wwho seemed to be interested in the project. However, this time when we arrived, there were only three students. One student, Dante, was new but excited to be a part of theJepson Shakespeare Project. We asked the returning students to see if they were interested in any specific part to which they responded that they were open to playing any part.

We were curious as to why the student rates had dropped off from last week. Laura mentioned to us that many students were involved in other activities afterschool that prevented them for leaving early or participating in both activities. She also mentioned that the gap from the rehearsal time and the dismissal time had many students leave early. The wait time in between both were between 30-40 minutes. Since Molly and Taylor both have classes until 2:45, it is difficult for us to leave any earlier.

During our rehearsal, we read through th script and described the plot the students again. They mentioned that they had finally started the book in class (Laura told us they took a while to start) so the students had a general understanding of the play. We then diverged and learned that many of our students were seniors. They asked us about the college application process, Richmond, class, extra curriculars, and more. We reminded Laura that we would not be at John Marshall the next week due to Fall break and that we would be back on Monday, October 19th.

During the class work day on Thursday, we read through the act and focused scene by scene. We wrote possible blocking and staging notes for the script and created a running prop list. Realizing that estimating the number of students at rehearsal was difficult, we wanted to combine parts. Titania and Hyppolita were a natural doubling. We also wanted to combine the mechanical characters in case we did not have enough students. At this moment, it seems like we may have approximately five students.

I have been a little behind on my blog posts but I have been keeping notes of our meetings and remember many things about our meetings.

Week 5 was less fortunate in terms of numbers. We had two participants from OSHER show up and we were left with 5 people to try and act out Act 5. Despite our extremely low numbers, we persevered and read through the play twice. One of our actors took on about 5 characters and brought in three different bags of props for all of the characters. She is by far the stud of the group at the moment. While acting out two of the characters that she was filling in for someone else, she changed some of their lines and decided how they should act on stage.

Besides Sherryl taking control of the play, we got some productive staging done during our meeting of only 5 members. We don’t know exactly which stage we will be working on for the final play so we aren’t quite sure how we will be able to manage the spacing of the play within a play. However, we now know how we would like to position once we know which stage we are on. The actors for the play within a play will be on center stage and the “audience” will be set up on the side of the stage so that they can watch the play and still turn to talk towards the actual audience. This was really important for us to accomplish and it is awesome that we got so far with only 5 people.

This past week was a little unusual for our group. We unfortunately did not know that Higher Achievement was not meeting and therefor were not able to work with our kids. Although we did not meet with them we were still able to work on our act. Had we done what we planned on we would have done some tongue twisters to work on their speech for the play. We then would have split them up by character groups to work on the play and actually acting it out.

Last week we were able to be narrow down our act. We started picking out lines for the characters with minimal lines and for those without any currently. We also figured out how we want to organize all our students who are extras or for those characters that have multiple students playing them. We originally had some girls being fairies but decided to go another way and keep with the original characters in our act. We will just switch the lines to make sure everyone has something to read. Hopefully this week we are able to implement these new ideas with the students.

We’re getting closer! Unlike our last effort in bringing them all together, the kids were willing to run through the whole Act together! All of the kids were present (physically and mentally) and seemed engaged with their words. It’s exciting to see the progress they have made since our first couple weeks. Kniko, a regular troublemaker, was very active this week and promised us he would be coming to the show. After a couple weeks of hearing them tell us how they’re not coming, it was nice to hear that from the “ringleader.”

I really think the kids are starting to respect us because whenever they strayed away from the task, they responded to us when we told them to focus. When I leave all the boys come over to give me high fives and handshakes. I think they like seeing us every week and they’ve definitely grown on me too. As nice and respectful as they have been to us, they were relentless with the program director this week. It is nice to no longer be on the receiving end of that criticism. Lastly, two or three relationships have formed between the kids because of this group. It is quite funny to see myself as a matchmaker!