Five weeks left, and we’re starting to get into the swing of things. Blocking (where performers move on stage) is mostly complete; this week, we do our first true stumble-throughs.
One of the best things I’m most proud of about our theatre is its integration with the Youth Theatre. We do many things that start out being tinkered with during a Youth Theatre session or we put the direct creation of productions into the hands of students. For The Hobbit, we have things designed by our professional team, and we’re teaching students to carry out those visions. The floor mural (a regular summer tradition) was designed by our scenic designer, and the actual painting was started at our Art Unleashed camp last week.
The end result is pretty fantastic, and students get tons of hands-on experience during the process.
This production also has many things we’re still figuring out, like some complicated shadow puppet sequences. Luckily, we’ve got a fantastic puppeteer on the production team who also teaches for our summer theatre camps. Again, our amazing students started troubleshooting these sequences and helped guide us in the directions we will likely move towards for the final show.
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that I always learn as much (if not more) from my students as they do from me. It isn’t uncommon for some people to underestimate what children are capable of. In the theatre world, “children’s theatre” can be considered less than theatre with adults, but I’d like to point out that adults almost never find as creative a solution as children do. With the Youth Theatre, we try to maintain a safe atmosphere to try things and fail at things; this usually ends up with some awesome swings at projects that get to be way cooler because we had a pretty thorough experimentation phase.
… although it also means our program will be limited in space because 34 theatre campers helped develop the amazing things we’re working on for the show. I guess we’ll just have to take one for the team and pack the program end-to-end with the names of our partners. 😉