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.

John's Check-In #1

4/28/11

The New Brunswick High School Program is off to a great start! Jen and I are teaching two sections with Mr. Thornburg the head of the New Brunswick Theater Department. The classes range in ages and experience levels. The first class we teach is a Performance Ensemble class of students who have opted to take a more advanced acting performance class. The other class is a Theater Techniques class that is geared more towards the general introduction of all theater forms from design and management to performance. Jen and I having fun with these two groups and we while we do similar work in both classes it is interesting to see how we adjust depending on the group in front of us.

A message from Artistic Director John P. Keller

Hello New Brunswick Theater Festival (NBTF) and Collaborative Arts Followers. It was a long and very cold winter but I am happy to say that because of the dedication to many individuals we emerged this spring even stronger. The success of last-years educational outreach and our inaugural main-stage show, Romeo and Juliet paved the way for us to kick off this year with even more resources. Along with my fellow Artistic Director Dan Swern and Collaborative Arts and NBTF company members, we have spent the winter months preparing curriculum and production concepts, writing major grants, planning fundraisers, and putting in place a permanent company of actors, designers, directors, and writers who are dedicated to teaching and pursuing professional artistic careers.

I’m happy to be returning with Jen Ring this year to both New Brunswick and Perth Amboy school districts. As the core-teaching faculty for NBTF, Jen and I have been busy working with both cities in scheduling and planning this springs theater residencies. Thanks once again to Mr. Jim DeWorken in the New Brunswick Superintendents Office; we are back, teaching in New Brunswick High School with the fantastic Steven Thornburg and his students in the Theater Department. We have been working with two different groups this year: an introductory theater class and a senior level performance ensemble class. Building on last years physical theater work we are once again cultivating students to become apprentices for this years summer production.

In addition to the New Brunswick program, Jen and I have returned to work with Liz Mery Ramirez in the Perth Amboy Recreation Department. Last winter we presented a 10-week Shakespeare workshop that culminated in a final production of an abridged version of A Midsummer Nights Dream presented to a theater full of parents, friends, and Perth Amboy Mayor Wilda Diaz in the beautiful new Perth Amboy YMCA Theater. This year we are trying something a little different, working with High School students on the writing and performance of their own original work.

In addition to all of the work on NBTF, Collaborative Arts has been very busy growing and re-organizing. Thanks to our board of directors and an expanded leadership we are in the process of using a Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage grant to completely re-vamp our website which will launch late spring.

Best,

John Keller

Collaborative Arts Leadership

Artistic Director New Brunswick Theater Festival

The Joy of a Well-Made Play

Well, we're officially two sessions into our program in Perth Amboy, and I'm just tickled turquoise.

To begin I should tell you that the project we've decided to tackle during this residency is right up this teacher's personal alley. Over the course of eight weeks we are going to work with 16 students to develop an original performance, based on characters in their lives. I'm asking these teenagers to take on ALL of what it takes to make a piece of theatre, and so far they seem to be digging it.

We met for the first time last Wednesday afternoon and I was immediately impressed by the positive energy this group exudes. When presented with the often-frustrating task of batting a Koosh ball around in a circle for the first time, these guys and gals stayed calm, laughed off the failures and didn't waste any time assigning blame to one another. The speed with which they improved at playing the simple game was astonishing, as was the seeming ease with which they silently transformed the gymnasium into a recognizable pirate ship in under a minute.

Today, a current Rutgers MFA playwright graced us with his presence and his expertise. Josh Levine loaded us all up with tools for combatting writer's block, a condition which he swears does not exist. Warm, fuzzy feelings washed over me as Josh described to the class one of my very favorite things: a well-made play.

Today, for the first time, I considered the merits of introducing a class to dramatic structure before attempting to teach them anything about acting. While Josh asked the students to consider what Dorothy's objective in The Wizard of Oz might have been, it occurred to me that there might be enormous value in being able to refer to things like inciting-incidents, objectives and obstacles. After all, these are the things that determine actions and tactics and all those other words by which actors eventually come to live.

The more I think about it, the more I like the lesson we all attended this afternoon. Most of these students took this class because they want to be actors. As an actor, I think it can be easy to forget that making a play takes skill and developing a skill requires practice. Heck, it can be easy to forget what it's like to be in a play (tv show/movie etc) with jobs so hard to come by. So many factors go into the casting process and we get caught up in crediting/blaming our looks and our luck for the roles we land and the opportunities that come our way. There's a lot we can't control, but what we can do is make plays of our own and make them as well as we can... and learn.

The students are writing their first short scenes and bringing them in to start to read through as actors this Wednesday. We shall see.

Happy Tuesday.

-Jen Ring

Director of Education

Learn more about NBTF

In case you missed it, here's some of the press we got during our first season:

Peter Filichia's Star Ledger Review of Romeo and Juliet

and

A nice article on last year's Shakespeare residency with middle school students in Perth Amboy

We're Back!

Actually, we never really went away.

Not really.

Here's a quick recap of what we've been up to since Romeo and Juliet closed in August:

-We celebrated Halloween by commissioning a six-pack of original radio plays based on New Brunswick ghost stories, getting a fabulous group of Mason Gross actors together and performing them with foley in front of a live audience. The event was so much fun for everyone involved that we plan on making it an annual tradition. Cross your fingers for next year's radio plays to be broadcast over local air waves!

-In January we had the opportunity, courtesy of our good friends at the New York One-Minute play Festival, to host the first ever New Jersey One-Minute Plays. The event took place over the course of two nights and theater artists from all over the state got involved. The show was fantastic, attendance was great and we even raised some money! If you've never heard of One-Minute Plays, you're missing out. Check them out as curator Dominic D'Andrea takes the country by storm: http://oneminuteplays.wordpress.com/

-We've chosen a show for our second summer production! The announcement will be made very soon:)

-Educational residencies have resumed in New Brunswick High School and through the Department of Recreation in Perth Amboy. The focus at NBHS will once again be Shakespeare in preparation for our summer festivities (there's a nice hint as to what we'll be doing for you), and this year our focus in Perth Amboy will be working with high school students twice a week after school to create an original piece of theatre about their lives and their community. I am happy to announce that the marvelously handsome and talented playwright, Josh Levine, will be joining our teaching staff for this endeavor.

In addition to these accomplishments each individual member of NBTF has been extremely busy acting, directing, producing, teaching, designing, and adventuring in other ways on his or her own. You'll hear more about us soon, but for now... We're thrilled to be back on the radar and gearing up for our sophomore season.

Stay tuned.

-Jen Ring

Director of Education