Sunday, February 21, 2010
Shakespeare contest brings out the best in young thespians
Post Gazette: "'Share Shakespeare!' directed actor John Ahlin to the nice full house that gathered yesterday afternoon at the O'Reilly Theater for the finals of the 16th annual edition of the Pittsburgh Public Theater's Shakespeare Monologue and Scene Contest."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I am very impressed by this event and good for the students! The school children as young as 8-12 and 4-7 tackle the acting of Shakespeare's work. Because of its old written style, it is hard to have the subtle sensation in characters' hearts directly into our heart by hearing, unless the almost poetic language is read with dynamics in reader's expression.
Because I have not explored his works so deeply, actually, the above is what I have just learned from my experience. I am currently working on music composition and sound sequences for one of the Shakespeare's plays for my thesis. Its characteristic feature of monologues helps the story rhythmically progress. It is like the role of songs in musicals, just without melody. I think these monologues are so important as how they are read affects the whole tone of the production.
I'm personally a huge Shakespeare fan, and I’ve entered several Shakespeare competitions in both middle school and high school. I have to say, I'm a bit torn on the idea of drama taking the form of competition. The best competitions are the ones that inspire performance, but don’t necessarily focus on winning. An organization that I am particularly fond of is DTASC, "Drama Teacher's Association of Southern California." The competition wasn't necessarily so high stakes, and usually people who didn't deserve to win did, so you went in with few expectations and just had an absolute blast for an entire day. Other competitions, however, don't exactly help young actors love and own their craft. In fact I've been to one competition in particular that was pretty dreadful. It was taken so seriously that I got overly nervous, and didn't really have fun at all. I don't necessarily think you can compare different Shakespearean roles anyways. So basically, competition can be a good thing, but I'm not such a fan...I don't think it does the craft too much justice. You can always say it won't affect you, but truthfully it really does. It put me in a bad place at least.
I think using competition as a motivator is fine. People tend to work harder when they have a sense of urgency and a drive to win. Not to say that winning is the ultimate goal, I think that lies in the education of the actors, but friendly competition can be healthy. As someone who read Shakespeare in 9th grade, I am very impressed that there is a category for 4-7. I am impressed that children of that age can read and understand Shakespeare on the level that is necessary to give a good performance. It speaks to the skill of their teachers that they are able to give their actors the tools they need to create their character and identify with that character. So, kudos.
This sounds like a great event and I am surprised that people went out in the snow storm to compete. It is great that these kids are learning Shakespeare at a very young age. When one is young the brain absorbs information like a sponge so it will make it easier for these children to understand Shakespeare when they are older. The other thing that surprised me was that when I first started to read this article I was sure that the kids would have only done scenes from the most well known plays and the comedies but there were a great number of tragedies that were discussed in the article that won. I am impressed.
Post a Comment