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