This week's camps have been all about mixing the serious with the fun and funny.
Let's start with the obvious one: Acting Out - Comedy vs. Drama. These campers have been having a blast learning what makes something humorous, and what makes something dramatic and serious, and then discovering the hilarity of combining them! Through acting games and movement exercises they've explored how to portray comedy and drama using their basic actor tools as well as exaggerated physicality. Even the dramatic stuff looks fun to us!
At Creative Drama - Dinosaur Tales, campers have been learning all sorts of serious amazing dinosaur facts as well as making up hilarious stories of their own about some less-than-realistic, but super fun, dinosaur characters. All their imaginative creations will come together with use of their other actor's tools (body & voice) to portray a unique story for family and friends on Friday. We've been told it has some unexpected twists & turns...
For the first week of the 2-week Musical Revue camp, the focus is on the serious business of learning music and choreography, while having a blast doing it, of course. The songs they're learning are Naughty from "Matilda: The Musical", Almost There from the film "The Princess & the Frog", I Won't Grow Up from the musical "Peter Pan", and Be Kind to Your Parents from "Fanny". In addition to learning the songs, they're also starting to improvise scenes and find characters to be in their final performance, which they will create themselves to tie the songs together!
Also starting its first week is Shake the Screen, an ETC-on-Film camp for rising 6th and up that's all about adaptations. Campers take existing works in the public domain and adapt them into their own unique films. So far they've taken a poem and shot scenes to accompany each line, creating a unique short film in the process. Serious fun. As camp continues almost each camper will have the opportunity to do almost every single job on a film set, from writing, directing, to acting.
Our last camp at Falls Church is also this week. Skits and Sketches promises to end with hilarious final scenes, but right now the campers are hard at work writing and using improv to workshop ideas, while also performing drafts for their audience and getting feedback. Then it's on to rewrites and another draft performance! It's sometimes very hard work to make something so funny, but they're putting in the work so they have the funniest skits and sketches possible to share with friends and family on Friday.
Overall a great, fun, hardworking group of campers this week, promising to have amazing final sharings for their friends and family. We can't wait!