A Tale of Snow White: Where are you?

     Attendance was an issue this week.

     At the very beginning of the production we have a parent meeting. The parents get all the information about the staff, a rehearsal schedule and a chance to make us aware of any conflicts the kids may have. We try to be reasonable, understanding if a child needs to leave early for a different practice or church. However, we rely on knowing what these conflicts our before we make the rehearsal schedule.

      This week, in one rehearsal, we had six unexcused absences. Only 1 of the 6 parents emailed me the day before to let me know that their child had "other plans". It upset me. They signed their child up for this. We have something very useful to teach them; how to communicate, focus, and work together. Not to babysit whenever it's convenient.

      For a show, where one of our prime educational objectives is building an ensemble, absences are a big deal. You can’t rely on somebody else to get you through a tricky spot on stage if they’re not there. As the stage manager, I felt bad because now I have to send out a very pointed email to address the issue.

Dell' Arte #1: Pure Joy

Pure Joy:

On September 28th I hoped on a train in Omaha to make my way to California.  Waved good-bye to my loving family and rode for 40 hours straight. It was a great experience that I advise everyone take at least once in their life time. I landed in San Francisco on the 30th where my friend from the PTP would pick me up and offer me a place to stay for the night.  I had not met her before, but had communicated over e-mail.  We picked up another PTP gal from the airport that night (she was arriving from Denmark).  In the next morning we made our way up the coast to the land of the Redwoods.

I arrived in Blue Lake on October 1st to a house filled with strangers.  I was the fourth to arrive. I live in a house with eight other PTP (Professional Training Program) students. Total Occupants are: three from the United States, two from Canada, one from Spain, one from Zimbabwe, another from Australia and one from Iran.  Jumping into this was terrifying and exciting.  Each one greeted me outside with a smile, handshake, and a helping hand.  We carried my stuff to a room and headed out to grab a beer.  I barely had time to take a breath and I was off again.  There was so many stories and moments to take in.  Very overwhelming and exhausting.  There are many different cultures and traditions that I am not used to.  One being my Spanish friend, who sleeps in the room next to me, always prepares a surplus of amazingly delicious food to feed his fellow PTP friends (notice they are no longer strangers, but dear friends).  I could go on and on about that, but let's fast forward to Orientation.

Orientation on Saturday!  Everyone was anxious to just get going.  We had enough of laying low and "me time" and wanted to get to work.  We started at 10 a.m. and had a tour of the main building (where the MFA 2yrs and 3yrs work), the downtown area which is all of a coffee-shop and world famous bar called, The Logger.  Then we walked down towards the river where the building the PTP and yr 1 MFA students will work.  It's called River Campus. Why? Because it's right next to the river.  
Once we arrived we began introductions,paper work, and procedures.  There are twenty eight of us in the PTP program.  Fifteen of which are international students.  This is unheard of, usually there are only 5-7 international students.  We already have the feeling our class will be a special one.  After all the paperwork, we received our first assignments: develop a 3 minute play by 6:45 pm Sunday night where it will be shown to staff, faculty, fellow students, and residents of Blue Lake. AHHHHH! We were numbered off and those were who we would work with.   But before you rehearse, there is a welcome potluck until 3:30. Okay.
Potluck, awesome. Great food, great games, and great people.

Rehearsal.  We worked well as a group and developed a story line pretty quickly.  We all agreed that we just needed to pick a path and go with it.  We had a list of this required for the 3 min play such as specific props, text, and a UDA AND A CLEAR BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND END.  This was familiar to me which made me thankful for the a-tude work done in Matt Foss' acting classes.  As we worked, I realized that there are completely different ranges of knowledge in the room as to creating theater. This was a comfort and frustration.  Comfort that no one has the answers and frustration in communicating ideas and beats.  You get used to the way you have been doing things at University and being thrown into this new world with different people is quite different. You learn quickly to accept the given circumstances of the situation at hand and move forward.  Our idea was motivated by one of our girls experience making the choice to pursue theater specifically at Dell Arte.  Things went well.  We listened to one another's ideas and began building a mini-play.  I went to sleep feeling a little to comfortable about the whole thing.  Knowing me, I should be terrified about all of this? Why does it feel so comfortable?

Orientation Sunday!  Meeting at 11 a.m. going over procedures in the rehearsal space and why the faculty and trainers are here and what their job and our jobs are.  One being, my body is my personal responsibility. The faculty are trainers, not doctors.  It is their duty to improve our awareness and strength of our body.  We are responsible for taking care of it.  After the meeting, we began rehearsals again for the show that night.  So, now I'm terrified.  There it is.  I began to doubt everything we were doing, felt the need to try to "save" the show...although it did not need saving, and started to compare all we worked for to others as we saw them rehearse. Looking back, it was all silly.  Naturally these plays were going to be struggles.  The whole process was condensed to two days and on top of that, no one really knew what they were doing.  But it was beautiful chaos Sunday night.  I have never experienced that much pure joy before.  I will save all of the magic for a more personal setting, dear readers (Harry potter voice over reference shout out!).

I will say this- I am very grateful and humbled to be given this opportunity. After Sunday,  I feel apart of something much bigger in this world.  And I feel that I am necessary in it and that it is time to get to work.

A Tale of Snow White: Time

     We have finished blocking the show. This week we started working through scene by scene and wringing from each what we can. A lot of what we have do is slow the kids down. They can process information very fast, however, the audience has to be able to see and understand it. This is another reason why we have been incorporating rhythm so much. With a steady pace, kept by their fellow ensemble mates, they're less willing to rush forward. Rushing, as some of them have figured out already, makes you look "silly".
   This week we also discovered how important it is to make your rehearsal schedule as specific as possible. If you call people who aren't needed or assume you can do more than time actually allows, you have extra people. If you have extra people, they will sit in the house and unintentionally distract the people who are on stage.
     
 

A Tale of Snow White : Rehearsals

    Almost four weeks into the production and everything is coming together. Rehearsals this week were incredible. All the kids came in memorized and ready to work. Due to their speedy brains we were able to jump right into character building this week.
    My duties as a stage manager for an STC show is much different than stage managing any other show. I still have to send emails and keep us on schedule, but with so many kids we have to split them up, so no one is sitting in the house for two hours bored to death. This means I don't have to sit in the house and write down all the blocking.
    We have established a system of sorts. At least for all of the blocking rehearsals, Kiersten will call whoever she needs to stage a certain scene. Then, I will pick a group of characters to work with, out of the cast left in the house. Often since they have all ready blocked the scene with the director, we will go out into the lobby, run the scene and then break it into smaller chunks and really clarify the action. Other times we will sit down and focus on the words and beats. My favorite times though are when I get to take all of the remaining cast out to the lobby and work on activities that will benefit everybody in the cast. We will play games that help them to understand the potential in their voices,
or, how listening well can change the entire show in a great way. It's amazing to see how fast they apply the skills learned in a game to their scenes.
   

A Tale of Snow White: First Week of Rehearsal

      We decided quite some time back that we wanted to use lots of rhythm and body percussion for this production. Not only does the script lend itself to this, with all it's raps and limericks, but it would also be a great way to force the kids to work together.
      Before we even had a blocking rehearsal we started teaching them some of the rhythms we had appropriated from various YouTube videos. We hoped this would get them into the world of the play together, rather than having them slowly seep in one at a time as we blocked their various scenes. It seemed to work. Most of them picked up on it very well. If one of them didn't, the rest of the group was more than willing to jump in and assist.
      Besides rhythm we also worked on our animals for the show. In one of the scenes, Snow White, flees from the huntsman through the forest following the advice of some clever animals. There are only five animals we needed to create but we figured it best to have the whole ensemble brainstorm which creatures would be the best. After a while we had them get up and try some of these animals out and then we pulled the best ones and had them explain how they were doing it to the rest of the cast.
      During the next rehearsal, I worked separately with just the five kids who were cast as animals. Having selected what animals they would like to be we started building these animals layer by layer. The first layer we called "safe and curious". Humans get from point A to B (most the time) in the most direct way we can. Animals on the other hand seem to take the most inefficient route sometimes, stopping, backing up, walking in circles. The kids and I decided the animals weren't inefficient at all but rather distracted by their great senses of smell, sight, and hearing, which could tell them if the thing they were approaching was safe or not. After experimenting with this layer we were out of time for that day but I told them all to go home and watch videos of their animals so we decide how each one individually moves next time.
       It felt really great to see all the kids come together over creating animals and stomping their feet. And unlike the last show I was involved in, it feels like their is always something that every kid can contribute. Even if it's just them watching their fellow cast mates and saying "Hey, that looks like my dog!"

Story Theatre Company : A Tale of Snow White

I should have explained what exactly my internship is before I posted my first blog.
  Over the course of the next semester I will be doing an internship for Story Theatre Company, a children's theater based here in Ames. I will be the stage manager and instructor for their production of A Tale of Snow White, an very loose adaptation of the original Grimm brother story, aimed at kids.
    As a stage manager for a children's production I have all the duties of a regular stage manager but also the added responsibility of being the babysitter of almost forty kids for two hours. My main goal in this project is to improve my communication skills in a theatrical setting.
I'll keep everyone updated!

A Tale of Snow White : AUDITIONS & CALL BACKS

Auditioning kids may be the saddest thing I've ever done. When considering who is to play Snow white or the Mirror, it does not matter if they tried “really hard” or if they are adorable. If they can’t project or won’t participate in the creature walk it won’t work out.

 "Will we all get parts?” asked one little girl after a round of monologues. “I’m afraid we don’t have enough parts for everybody” I said, trying not to give anything away in my voice concerning the decision we had made about her. “Oh.”

             You have to pay attention to many different things when going through a call back process with kids. First, you have to ignore your own self reasoning out why one kid isn’t as good as another. Nobody has ever tried to teach them better, or, they did try really hard. What if they really need this?

Secondly, you must pay attention to how you structure the little time you have because you don’t want to give away your casting before the cast list goes out. For instance, you can’t keep calling one person up to read as the evil queen , even if you’re doing the scene for the purpose of finding the right boy to play the Mirror.

Another thing to consider is how conversational you are with the kids, I know some of the kids from other productions but I don’t want to seem like I’m favoring them, even if I am just catching up because it won’t seem that way to the kids you don’t know, or their parents who are watching like a hawk from the back of the theatre.

About kids “from other productions”, you have to use knowledge you've gained about the kids from past productions in your decisions. We have a few kids who are returning after two or three shows with STC. They may be really talented, as most of the kids are but they are also rude, sassy, constantly upstaging, and bad at taking direction. Truly, they did add something to the production but if they were hard to handle, was it worth it?

These are the things Kiersten and I had to consider as we tried to find a cast of 38 out of the 50 talented kids that auditioned.