Today’s Date: 7/5/23
Show Title: JULIUS CAESAR
Director: Natasia Reinhardt
Staff Crew: Assistant Directors: Cole Metz and Liv Meredith. Dramaturg: Eli Dietrich. Stage Manager: Lillian Malone.
What we did
Our fantastic RDA assistant directors, Cole Metz and Liv Meredith, took the campers after warm-ups this morning to do some acting exercises in character. Liv is instructing the actors to move with intention and embody certain animals that correlate to their characters. After they found their character “spirit-animal,” they began to move around the room, embodying that animal. In the beginning, many of the campers found it amusing, but committing to this embodiment helped intention. Then, the campers were instructed to interact with the other campers in the room. For example, how would a dog interact with a rabbit? This involves walking with intentions that are assigned numbers. An example of this would be walking at a “3,” being slow and solemn, and a “9,” being energetic and fast.
Cole’s training was based on famous acting theorist Tadashi Suzuki’s method of viewpoints. One of the first things he did was to have the campers find a “ready stance,” or a neutral position that is healthy to begin acting from. Then, he had the campers bend at the knees with their backs straight (a more difficult task than it may seem). He introduced the idea of performing in rehearsal. By this, Cole means that when we are rehearsing scenes, we have to keep posture, style, purpose, and acting to experience and practice the difficulty. At the end of rehearsal, we began to work on our show song. The campers are already sounding great on day two of song rehearsal!
Quick and Quotable
- From the play Did not do much scene work today. The title of today’s post is a quote from 4.1, where Octavius (Zyir) says, “And some that smile have in their hearts I fear / Millions of mischiefs…” when he speaks of the start of the Civil War.
- From the director Natasia is having Archer play the piano for the show song. Carson also offered to play the guitar, and Pheonix offered the clarinet.
- From the cast After Liv’s exercises, the campers sat and talked about their experience inhabiting their characters in a guided meditation-like setting. There were some wonderful choices made in this space.
Production Insights
I think that having the actors truly understand some core acting theory will help them. Camp is not only a place for rehearsal and pumping out a show; it is also important that we teach campers about the theory that surrounds the art. Sometimes it can be daunting to be expected to learn and rehearse in the same space, but these campers stepped up to the task and were very attentive. As for the music, I can tell that we are all very excited to show off our fantastic singing voices!