Children learn theatrical design skills at Atlanta Public Library Theater Discovery Camp

 

[July 23, 2018] 

During the week of July 16-20, eight second through fifth graders participated in Atlanta Public Library’s Theater Discovery Camp.



The camp was led by Jean Kerr along with several assistants. Kerr chairs the School of Theater Arts at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her area is movement, which includes dance, physical characterization, masks, and stage combat. Kerr also choreographs and directs theatrical performances.

Kerr said at the camp, the children usually build a script, but this year, they built their theatrical skills. One thing Kerr and her assistants have been doing is teaching them to “Shuffle off to Buffalo.” In addition, they have worked on active listening, physical listening, and the design process for the scenic world and costumes for the characters.



Each child took one of Aesop’s Fables and created a different story with at least two different characters and two different scenes.



For instance, one child took the story of “The ant and the grasshopper” and made it a futuristic story with the terminator as the grasshopper, the Antman character from Marvel Comics as the Ant, and a robot version of Abraham Lincoln.

Another child did the story of “Mercury and the Woodman” where a woodman goes out to the woods to chop down trees and loses his ax. Mercury finds three axes and asks the woodman if each one is his, but the woodman says only the final one is his, so he is rewarded with all three axes. When others pretend to lose their axes, Mercury knows they are lying. The moral of the story is honesty is the best policy.

Library Director Cathy Maciariello said the children made storyboards and scenes using these stories. She said they were trying to show the children all that goes on before a play is performed. Instead of the performance aspects, children learned about the complexities of creating a play.

Kerr said the children did worksheets on story plots, scenic design, and costume concepts. They had to do design homework and research, then find pictures to help inspire their scenes.

Maciariello said the children became scene designers, costume designers, and set designers.  Children have been working on scenes all week and making a three-dimensional theater, or model, box.

Linnea, who helped with costume designs, said each child created the scenes for their stories and designed the characters and their costumes.

On Thursday, they hung the scenes in their model boxes. Kerr said they all made some great models.



Another part of the day was spent playing theater games and Kerr taught them some games she has done with her theater students. One game focused on time with the children first running quickly across the room and then moving as slowly as they could. Kerr told them to move like a snail in the garden or like they were walking in thick, warm mud.



After the games, the children paired up to read their poetry. Kerr said the children wrote poems based on something that had happened to this summer. To create the poem, they had to write sentences that rhymed. Assistant Danielle had the pairs read their own poems to one another then read each other's poems out loud. For Friday, they had to memorize someone else’s poem and recite it.

The children then did dances led by assistant Carson, who taught them steps of Tap dance. They first worked on a heel drop and steps, then added in hops and leaps when the music played. Other steps they learned were scuffle, spank, brush, and shuffle.

They ended Thursday’s lesson by marching in time to the beat. By Friday, they had to do a dance with all the steps together.

The final activity on Thursday was costume design. Using ideas they had researched for costumes, the children chose costumes that worked with their characters and then designed, drew, and colored the costumes.

The children at the Theater Discovery Camp learned many theatrical skills used in performance as they discovered all the work that goes into theatrical performance.

[Angela Reiners]