I’ve officially started my work as a counselor at East Valley Children’s Theater! So much spine-chilling progress has been made over just two days.
There are so many games sprinkled throughout the day. Every game has its own separate purpose: some are for focus, some for rhythm, some to get creative juices flowing. My favorite one that I’ve learned is Green Glass Door. The players have to guess a certain rule telling what they can bring into the green glass door by asking if they are allowed to bring various objects inside. It really challenges the mind and creates focus. I was happy to see too that the kids have gotten fond of the classic BASIS Theater game of hand-scratching mafia (introduced by yours truly).
We’ve also mostly done building our spooky world. The kids decided the name of the spooky town to be… Spookytown! Ok yeah, you could argue it could be more creative, but it really rolls off the tongue. Plus, it’s easy to remember for replacing the word Halloween in “This is Halloween,” so it becomes “This is Spookytown.”
We also took votes on the two motto ideas that are dividing the town. I’ll show the list of the top ten submissions below. Everyone ended up voting on 2 and 7, but which one would you pick?
The campers also got to decide what scary being they want to be. We took a bit to brainstorm some ideas on the board, and the creativity really impressed me. There were many references to other cultures, including Mexican folklore and Greek mythology. They got way more specific with some of these than I imagined; just take a look for yourself. They then took the end of the first day to draw their characters for the show and describe their personality. I decided to join them in drawing our monster selves and drew my costume from last year’s Haunted Hallway: me as a Frankenstein doll. Today, we took time for each actor to share their unique characters with the class! It was awesome to learn each character’s powers, props, and personality!
You know what’s also crazy? We already finished learning every number in the show! The campers had to learn four numbers each in this order: the opening number (“This is Spookytown”), the closing number (“Ways to Be Wicked”), the other big group number (“What is This Feeling?”), and their individual group numbers (“That Beautiful Sound” for team classic jump-scarers and “When You Use Science” (adapted from “When You’re an Addams”) for team science fiction). All of the choreography is so upbeat, incorporating classic theater dance moves such as the grapevine, jazz squares, and pivot turn. There’s also lots of room in the choreography for the kids to freestyle act and get creative!
Learning the lyrics has been the harder part; there are some big words and challenging tunes in these! I got to lead a game of Magic Microphone (a version of fill-in-the-lyrics)) for “Ways to Be Wicked” today (which by the way is a number I’m enthused that every camper is absolutely loving), and that really tested my middle voice stamina. These fun, themed lyric sheets designed by Breona help the learning process though!
Honestly, I’m having an absolute blast! I feel like I’ve formed a bond with these campers over such a short time from leading all those games to eating lunch with them. I can’t wait to update you guys on the final show! Tomorrow, we finish writing the show as the kids will be filling in the dialogue in between the songs. Then, we add costumes and polish the show for the parents to watch on Friday!
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danielle_l
Hello, reader! I do not know why most of the text is caption-sized; I did not type it into the caption section of the post! I will try to get it fixed soon, and I am so sorry!
Hi Danielle, this camp sounds like it's going great! I can't believe some of the things they're coming up with. I'm curious about the camp's timeline—how long is each day? Do you think there will be any trouble finishing the entire performance for Friday? I hope everything goes well!
Hey Danielle! This camp sounds like so much fun! I personally would love to do the activity of creating my own character. Your drawing of yourself as Frankenstein doll is also amazing, you're so talented! How long will the whole show be?
Heyo, Cason! Happy you're impressed all the ideas the campers are coming up with as well! Each day for the attendees goes from 9 AM-4 PM, but counselors arrive at 8:30 AM. It is a very long day, but a ten-minute break is given at the end of each hour which is always very helpful to keep motivation high. As for finishing the performance by Friday, we have already written and stumbled-through the whole show, so there's no issue with finishing the creation of the show itself. What may be tricky is getting off-book and memorizing all those tricky lyrics in only two days, but we're going to run the show so much tomorrow and Friday that it will all work out. There is always a bit of improvement every time we run something; it's so cool to see!
Hiya, Allison! This whole experience is so fun; I'm glad you're getting that through my descriptions! Thanks for loving my drawing as well; that means a lot considering your own work! As for the run time of the show, it is very short. Today we timed the show to be around 20 minutes. Each musical number is 1 minute 30 seconds long maximum and then the dialogue makes up the rest. I'll have to consider this timing when writing the scenes in my own musical. For a camp like this, we're going for quality over quantity: polishing and performing the little we have with our all!
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