PLAY THE GAME!

We have completed our first day of Play the Game camp at Venus Theatre!

The markers have been opened and the creativity is now on full blast.

This morning in a story building exercise the girls created a play called “Daisy Saves the Ant” which included a girl, a frog, and an ant.  Costume sketches were drawn and a full execution of the play took place.  All before lunch!

I intended to start the morning with a Babe Didrikson hike.  But, my loyal assistant Bonnie pointed out that the light rain could get heavy before it lifted.  So glad I listened to her!  So, first thing this morning we visited Randy Kroop and the girls got a tour of the boot factory.  Which led to a little conversation about shoes and costumes.

Morning workshops were a tremendous amount of fun.  Our students now know stage directions both as human beings, kangaroos, turtles, frogs, and snakes.  And, they know about the origins of the raked stage leading to the stage directions via the Elizabethan era.

Bonnie and Maddie are morning campers so we said goodbye to them and to the morning only after we had lots of journal pages and character sketches hanging on the wall.

Lunch was awesome and filled with lots of chatter and a little web surfing.  I found out that two of our girls actually have their own web site and it revolves around chewy food which, we all must agree, IS the best kind!

In the afternoon Zara and Leela joined us.  They couldn’t be there in the morning because there were so many snow days last year that they had to GO TO SCHOOL!  So, we began “How She Played the Game” work.  We learned about Eleo Sears and talked about Babe a bit too.  It was so amazing to see the girls reaction to Eleo.  I think my favorite moment was when Gabrielle said, “I think I know how this ends.  We’re all wearing shorts and pants so I think Eleo won her bet.”  It was a great exploration of text.  And, we discovered that the girls will be riffing on the script through exercises I’ll give them the rest of this week.  We still need to set the performance time.  They understand the three parts of a story, the aspects of character, and the rules of performance already.  They are pretty spectacular.

After camp was over the girls were waiting for their pick ups.  They revisited the Sherlock exercise from the morning.  So, two sisters taught two other sisters a new game.

Between 3 and 4 everyone went home.  The last thing I remember is a 7 year old voice filling C Street with a sentence, “I LOVE CAMP!” long after she was out of sight.  Music to my ears.

See you tomorrow morning at Venus Theatre Summer Camp.