Last week we had another successful week at Higher Achievement! We are definitely getting more comfortable with our group and they are feeling more confident around us and with working on the play. There were roughly the same amount of kids, a few less and one or two added, but the level of excitement and participation remained the same. We started off the meeting with another theatre game because we felt it really worked well for us last time and engaged the kids in a fun way before we asked them to be more serious. We played the mirror game and they were having so much fun that one of the peer leaders at Higher Achievement came into the room asking what all the noise was about. Thankfully, we got them to quit down for the next section but I honestly just love seeing them excited about the theatre games. Hopefully, this will result in less nerves or cold feet when the actual production comes.

Similar to our last meeting, we split into smaller groups after the game and worked on their pronunciation and delivery of Shakespeare’s lines. In my group, the boys were just as eager as last time and one of the new girls was surprisingly just as willing to come out of her shell and kept asking if we could read through her lines next. There is definitely still work to be done and some of the students are better at reading that others, but they are still doing much better than I anticipated. After the small groups, we came back together as a whole group and asked if there were any volunteers who wanted to read their lines. Their excitement and willingness to participate was great, but we were definitely more boy dominated when it came to participants. That is going to be one of my goals for the next few weeks, to get all the girls as excited as the boys about the play and hopefully have them feeling less shy about performing in front of everyone. Overall though, I thought it was another great week and can’t wait to keep working on their performing skills.

We were doing so well!!!!…. and then came some unpleasant ‘tude from one of the girls, and down went the group.  We split into 2 groups this week, and I worked with the Brooks Brothers (no relation to clothing company), Iyonna, and Nia. Together they make up the 4 way love triangle of the play. Iyonna was in a really sour mood and more or less ruined practice for everyone involved. It sucked because the boys actually wanted to go over blocking, acting and their lines today! Nia as always was just super distracted, but she got progressively worse the more Iyonna complained and shouted about directions and life, and physically beat on my Demetrius and Lysander. Marcus Brooks got tackled to the ground like 6 times. It was one of the most frustrating practices for me yet. I also realized I know nothing about giving acting tips and directing interaction and movement on stage. Oliver’s group sped right along, and so when they finished we just gave up and gave everyone free time. I pulled Iyonna aside and asked her what was going on. She had a really bad day at school and someone had made a comment to her she got really offended by. We agreed to leave the attitude behind next week. Either way, majority of the kids are refusing in advance to show up on December 4th. I’m not sure how much power they have to make that decision, but I really hope someone can force them to come. It would be terrible for the kids that are excited about this to have their moment ruined by others.

While I was not expecting anyone to show up due to the craziness of last week, I was pleasantly surprised to see the same group as expected with one addition back to the fold. I believe that the roles that the students chose truly will fit their personality. One male student was very adamant about playing the role of a female. As we are putting on Shakespeare, I believe this would only add to the authenticity and we are going to run with it. Additionally, the script is a bit too long and too dense. The students did an amazing job struggling through the tough lines. Unfortunately many of them do not have great reading skills and this leads to the act being drawn out longer than intended. This should not pose a problem because you have begun to see the students come out of their shells and act a little as they read lines. They have in fact become more comfortable with me and have even begun to respect myself and the fellow students a lot more. I think this is starting to turn for the better which is a great sign considering some of the apprehensions held during early visits.

Haley did say that transportation may needed to be provided. I am not certain about how she plans on getting permission slips, but I did ask her to email Dr. Soderlund and she said that she would. With all the new energy towards the project I really hope we can get the kids there to perform. If not, ad libbing works just fine too.

This Tuesday we had another successful rehearsal at Higher Achievement. While our numbers keep dwindling slightly, we still have a pretty good amount of students. There are some different kids there each week because they often get rotated based on their behavior (if they’ve been good- they come with us, and vice-versa), but we usually have pretty much the same children each week. It has been really fun getting to know the kids a little bit more and to see them come out of there shell. I’ve spent a lot of time with one girl in specific while we are in our small groups. She was very shy at first but now she just wants to rehearse her lines and participate a lot more, especially in our small groups.

This week we started off rehearsal by playing the mirror theater game (they love the theater games). We had two children come up at a time and one was assigned to be the mirror and the other was the mirror-er. The kids could not talk and we encouraged them to focus on mimicking exaggerated actions and facial expressions. The kids really got into it because they became super competitive, seeing who could do the best facial expressions. This escalated into the children doing dance moves, which made it even more fun because it was kind of like a dance off. I think they liked this game a lot and it helped them with their self-expression and performance confidence. We played this game for about 20 minutes and then broke up into our same small groups to practice their lines. This was beneficial because we read the lines closely and I was able to help the kids with any mispronunciations or questions they had. With about 10 minutes left in rehearsal, we had some of the kids come up to the front of the room and recite their lines in front of the whole class. While they still did pretty good, it’s clear were going to have to work on certain things like vocalization and not holding the script in front of their face. We definitely still have a way to go but the rehearsals have been going well and the children seem to be really enjoying it.

We moved on from reading the script last week and began blocking. The kids are really coming out of their shells and it’s great. Behavior and cooperation aren’t perfect, but considering where we started it’s much improved. We didn’t really get to acting. This practice was more about who is on stage at the same time, where they should stand and enter from etc.. The kids are still fighting the Shakespearian English. Every practice we get the “why can’t we just do this in normal words” fight. Nia threatened to go rogue during the actual performance and “tell it like it is.” I figure if that actually happens, oh well, at least it will be amusing. Next week I think we will split into groups again and focus on actual acting and integration between actors.

This past Monday, our group showed up to John Marshall to find one student who stayed after school to participate in the rehearsal. Since Mrs. Ramsey had no way to contact us via phone, she was unable to let us know that no one else was showing up for rehearsal that day until we arrived. Apparently half of the students have after school activities, but the other half just felt like going home that day. She believes that she has less of an authoritative stance to get the students to stay for rehearsal than if Molly, Allison, or I were to ask them to stay.

Mrs. Ramsey asked if we had any ideas to get the students to stay and be more accountable. I said food always attracts people (I would know from personal experience). We also discussed possibly emailing the students the weekend before to inform them on exactly what we will be doing at rehearsal as well as asking them who will be able to commit the night before, that way we know our numbers ahead of time. Maybe by telling them what we plan on doing they will be more inclined to show up. Mrs. Ramsey sent  their emails to Molly, so we will definitely try that out for next week.

Hopefully we are successful!

After last week’s success, Lydia and I decided the kids were ready to come together and begin acting out the Act. Well, that wasn’t quite what happened. When they are all together, they are very distracted and loud to the point that Lydia and I cannot achieve much. That being said, we successfully did our first run through and some of the boys that didn’t read at all in the first two weeks were reading large roles! I am  confident in the Athenian’s acting, but I am a little nervous about Oberon and Puck. Our Oberon frequently says how he isn’t going to come to the show and barely cooperates (even though he did a great job last week). Our Puck hasn’t shown up in two weeks…

I think we are going to separate the kids between the Athenians and the Fairies again this week so we can go over lines more and begin blocking and actual acting. Hopefully in doing so we will be able to run through the script twice before going to play basketball. As far as my personal relationship is concerned, I can tell boys look up to me, even if they won’t admit it. They love playing sports with me after our read through and they respond to my “demands” significantly more so than the first few weeks. I am hoping to leverage this trust to get them to actually begin to act, rather than just read.

(Originally written September 26, 2015; Posted now)

Despite our excitement to immediately work with the students on Monday, we had to cancel due to the highly anticipated bike race through Richmond. Laura and I had been emailing back and forth in order to create and tweak plans for when we would arrive at John Marshall. Earlier on Monday, she emailed me and mentioned that school was sending all of the students home. We agreed that we would be meeting our students for the first time on Monday, September 28th!

In spite of this little mishap, we were able to accomplish a lot of work in class. Previously, Taylor, Molly, and I read and timed the act; We transformed the act onto a document and all edited together. We associate our act as the act that solves all of the major plot holes so we wanted to eliminate extraneous sections that did not help with this ideal. For example we discussed the idea of eliminating Bottom and the Mechanicals. We wanted to simply the act to make it funnier and easier on our student playing Bottom. After many revisions, agreed on including it into the cut script. This decision was made with several considerations. One was after talking to Dr. Bezio, eliminating this mechanical interaction could potentially eliminate the fluidity and continuity between the fourth and fifth acts. Another reason was the fact that we had no idea how many kids would appear. We wanted our script to be flexible so that any of the students could present.

We took the film and we are adding flourishes to make the women more prominent and powerful in the play. For example when Theseus and Hippolyta are hunting and find the young lovers, we want Theseus to use Hippolyta as an advocate. We envision the relationship as cheesy between Bottoms and Titania, with Marvin Gaye music, and as an opportunity for comedic improvisation.

(First written September 19th, 2015; Posted now)

This past week, Molly, Taylor, and I started our discussion about Act IV of Midsummers Night’s Dream. We systematically started to figure out the logistics of our scene including its duration, characters, and plot. While Molly and Taylor read and timed our act, I contacted the site contacts: Verenda and Laura. They seemed excited for our arrival. (It was a little relaxing to know that this was their first time with the Jepson Shakespeare project too!)

We knew little about our group but we wanted to familiarize and modernize Shakespeare. Granted we picked a pretty fun, comedic play that would allow for our students’s personalities to shine. We wanted to assign characters a little later so we could get to know our students. Being that we were working with high schoolers, I was excited and hesitant to work with them. I was just in high school a little over a year ago, I understood the angst and stress of high school. I had many questions before we started our endeavor at John Marshall High School.

1) Being only a few years older, would they listen to us? How should we interact with them – as a mentor or teacher?

2)Do these children know who Shakespeare is?

We do know that the students are reading Midsummers Night’s Dream in class so they will have an understanding of the play, the characters and their motivations, and etc. They may even be able to help us with staging because  they may envision the blocking differently. When I emailed Laura, she estimated that approximately 15 students would show up. Are all of these students in her English classes? So is this a supplemental class or project to her class or is this an after school activity. I guess that we will find out when we meet Laura and the students!

This past week turned out to be a very successful visit to our school. In order to get the children excited about acting and what it entails we started our visit with a theater game. We made up situations that would have noticeable emotions they could act out. The other students were able to guess the action and emotion. The group as a whole had a fun time with it and everyone was into the game and didn’t want it to end. Only a few girls were shy about acting out but as the game went on they became more comfortable and joined in. It was a good chance to let everyone get up in front of the group to practice being on stage in a sense.

After playing the game we broke the students into three groups and each of us took a few students. In our groups we highlighted some of their lines and had them review them. Then they had the chance to read aloud in their small groups. This allowed us to gauge their reading abilities and help pronounce some of the tougher words so they could try and start remembering how to read them. Overall they did really well and seemed to enjoy being able to practice reading through the lines and start understanding their parts. This coming week should be just as fun and successful.