English Drama Excitement

Jyotsna and I are impressed with the enthusiasm, charm, and–yes, the CUTEness–of our drama students. With a fairly large group of often self-conscious kids (”What will the other kids THINK of me if I really do what she suggests?”) we do have our challenges. The first day, when asked to show their mood, the campers most often replied “Tired” or “Bored” or “I don’t have moods.” By today, they were willing to roar with laughter at “comic” stories they made up on the spot or “cry” at “sad” spontaneous tales or pretend to be horrified at “monster” sagas. In other words, they’ve loosened up. They don’t know that they have begun acting, but they have.

Your campers are intelligent and often creative, but they tend to focus on one side of the brain and let their imaginations doze–and all those college admissions people (and exams–I used to work on the ACT, the competitor of the SAT) demand using both sides. Since our campers range in age from 5 to 12, their levels of sophistication vary widely as well, and we have not been able to work together as a single group. So far, we are doing “warm up” exercises to prepare for real acting, and our youngest participants may not be able to sustain much in the way of real theatre.

However, their charades, their story-telling, their puppet shows–all of these pursuits show evidence of progress, and I think that we are all growing pleased and comfortable with one another. We are posting some photos to give you some ideas of the things we are doing, but the best way to gauge your own child’s experience, of course, is to ask the child herself or himself.

Enjoy the photos, and if you have ideas for simple Chinese stories or folktales that we could act out, please let me know. The older ones can work on this.

By the way, to encourage our actors and actresses, we give a small ribbon and reward to one girl and one boy each week starting this week. For his constant good nature and creativity–and ability to stay on task!–Alec Huang was our boy Student of the Week. For her attention and willingness to try, despite being a bit reserved, Emily Fan was our girl Student of the Week.

If these were my kids, though, I’d be proud of each and every one of them. A lot of talent in this group!