6/15 The Home Stretch

Hello again.

This week marks the end of both of our 2011 spring residencies. New Brunswick High goes into exam mode next week, so we went easy on them, focusing on the prologue to Henry V. It's well known as the speech beginning with "O for a muse of fire...". We strayed away from A Midsummer Night's Dream with a purpose. If these students learn nothing else, I hope they

come to understand the healing magic that live theatre can do in the world, and that all it takes to make theatre happen... all it has ever taken... is a group of people coming together and agreeing to the play. We are all conjurers. We are all, at times, an eager audience. We are all capable of so much more than we know.

On that strangely serious note, it is with pleasure that I announce the culmination of this year's after-school program in Perth Amboy.

The Perth Amboy Department of Recreation and the New Brunswick Theater Festival present:

The Story of Us

A theatrical event imagined, written and performed by local students

Thursday, June 16th @ 7pm

Perth Amboy YMCA

We have two more rehearsals. Oh boy.

Cheers,

Jen

6/9

This week's flown by!
Our last few classes at New Brunswick High have focused on Shakespeare's verse. This is about as academic as we get. It's easy to forget that most high school students don't find scanning lines of iambic pentameter nearly as thrilling as we do now.

Though we spent several hours in front of the dry erase board this week, we started this unit by asking the students to find their pulses. One of my favorite things is watching somebody who "hates Shakespeare" realize for the first time that the rhythm of Shakespeare's verse is the rhythm of a human heartbeat. This simple discovery tends to open people up to hearing a lot more of themselves in the plays.

In Perth Amboy we're gearing up for our final week. The performance has been scheduled. The space has been booked. The script will be finished tonight. These students have worked hard on developing complex characters, and John, Ashley, Josh and I have really tried to make sure that the words they'll be speaking are their own. We have three more sessions with them to put it all together into a show. Details will be posted about the performance soon.

-Jen

Wednesday

6/1

After a successful morning working on some of the lovers' scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Performance Ensemble class, I headed into the afternoon class in Perth Amboy in a pretty good mood. NBTF company member Ashley Everage joined me for class for the second time today, taking over in John's absence. The Perth Amboy project is challenging because we're leading a group of high schoolers through both writing and performing their own material. Ashley was an enormous help as we sat in a circle and listened to each student read the monologue he or she is developing. We both had lots of questions to ask each of them. Where is your character? Have you ever said anything like this to anyone before? What's your point of view of the person or people you're addressing? The students have really put a tremendous amount of work into getting inside of another person the way an actor must, but we still have a long way to go. We did manage to get on our feet a bit and do some physical exploration of the characters. More of that will happen once the scripts are finished. I'm looking forward to playwright Josh Levine's return visit to the class on Monday. Hopefully we'll be able to put the finishing touches on the texts and begin to really play around and rehearse these things. It's nice to have a deep roster of talented folks to call for back up.

NBTF executive committee tonight. Summer plans are heating up. Check back here for details.

Cheers,

Jen Ring

NBTF Director of Education

Tuesday

5/31

Today we began working on scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream with the larger NBHS class. We began class with a quick warm-up involving stretches and tongue twisters that the students seemed reluctant to do, but it definitely helped bring everyone (teachers included) back from the long weekend. The class broke into groups to attack three different scenes, and the work of the first read-through commenced. It was wonderful to see students get increasingly excited about deciphering difficult language and finding the meaning of each line as their characters' circumstances became clearer to them. We'll keep working on these for at least the next week, really delving into acting and staging for the first time next class.

John and I are off to rehearse for an unusual acting gig. We are performing a play as part of a training session with the school of nursing at Rutgers. Should be an adventure. More tomorrow.

-jen

John's Check-In #4 & #5

5/3/11

We started talking this week with our classes about our upcoming summer production of Midsummer Nights Dream and the opportunity for them to Apprentice. One of our big goals this year is the expansion of the Apprentice Company to not just include acting but also design, stage management and production opportunities. New Brunswick High School students will be working alongside our production staff on the main-stage show giving them working experience in set, costume, and makeup design, marketing and production management.

5/10/11

One of the most beneficial things in teaching a new topic or concept is finding ways to present the material in as many creative ways as possible. This concept is not of course a new one, but is consistently a challenging one. Jen and I are always playfully kidding each other because we have different teaching techniques. I love visuals. I love writing things out and creating maps and charts and illustrating things on the board. Jen loves auditory learning. She likes discussion and telling the story with metaphor and context. We have found an interesting dynamic when we teach and because of our own preferences we seem to cover a topic with a 360 view. Mr. Thornburg affectionately calls it the Jen and John Show and our students seem to get a kick out of the animation we bring to our plot descriptions.

We started working on midsummer nights this week with our students in preparation for our production this summer. We covered the entire plot line and characters so everyone in the class was able to start with the same foundation. I had a full color coordinated character flow chart on the dry erase board while Jen talked about why characters behaved and talked in certain ways. I focused on the complexity of the plot and Jen talked about the poetry of the language.

The next day our students came back and recounted for us the previous days lesson. It was fascinating watching and listening to them as they brought the play to life for us. One student remembered the complexity of the lovers’ pairings because of the how it was outlined on the board. Another student recalled the argument between Oberon and Titania because of the powerful descriptions of the natural world at war had stuck with her.

John's Check-In #3

5/4/11

The Theater Techniques class played the patterned ball game today. In this game each person throws a tennis ball to one other person in the circle and so on until everyone has received the ball once. They must repeat this pattern while we slowly keep adding additional tennis balls. The game begins simple but requires intense focus as it becomes slowly more complicated. They really came to life. This group springs to life when they are involved in very focused high-energy activity.

John's Check-In #2

5/2/11

The Theater Techniques class is now at about 30 students. Any teacher who finds themselves in front of a group of high school students that size would probably break out in a cold sweat. I will certainly admit that this group keeps us on our toes but we are having a lot of fun with them. They are a little more timid than our Performance Ensemble class in that they hesitate to jump up and participate but I think it has more to do with fear of embarrassment rather than any kind of lack of interest. Once we get the ball rolling I find them to be energetic and creative. We have started splitting up the group for our ball game warm-ups every morning and it is a chance for Jen and I to get to know them better and keep their energy focused.