All-Singing, All-Dancing

Posted on by RoseIW

Last week, I was asked to run a singing workshop at a summer school for a group of 22 dance students between the ages of 5 and 12. I agonised, for days, over what on earth I could teach that would hold the interest of all students, male and female, from the youngest to the oldest.

And then, thanks to my cranky old iPod, it came to me. A classic: ‘Do-Re-Mi’ from The Sound of Music.

I’d warm up with some basic vocal games and exercises and then move on to a rousing rendition of Disney’s ‘Let It Go’ to get them through the initial embarrassment of singing in front of other people, something half of them had never done before. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t need to hand out words for this one! Frozen fever is still strong with children everywhere, it seems…

And then we would turn our attention to the main event. They seemed to enjoy the workshop, but it struck me just how afraid they all were of their own voices, how nervous of messing up the song. So we added some silly actions and I made the one twelve-year-old in the room our Maria, in an effort to boost her obviously low confidence in her voice.

“I can’t sing on my own,” she said. “I can’t sing.”

“You can,” I insisted. “I’ve been listening to you for the last half an hour, you’ve got a lovely voice!”

She gave it a go, and I had to turn the backing track right down for her to be heard. On her second attempt, she was a little louder. By run-through number three she held her head up high and sang to the rest of the room.

It was amazing to watch these children, some as young as five, engaging with a classic musical theatre number and with each other, offering encouragement and help to those who struggled to remember the words or the actions.

Singing workshops are difficult – you never know what you’re going to be faced with, if they’ll like the song you’ve chosen or if they’ll throw themselves into the work or not. But I can honestly say, having run many more workshops for adults than children, what most amazed me was how, after their initial shyness, the children gave the workshop their all and tried every single thing I threw at them without fear of reproach or ridicule from their peers.

That rarely happens in the adult workshops, where you can be facing a roomful of people who have spent their whole lives believing they ‘can’t sing’ and spend the whole time battling that notion. In the twelve-year-old ‘Maria’ that process had already started.

I find it fascinating, but also sad. And I feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to work with the children I met last week – I hope they went away feeling as confident in themselves as I felt in them. What a wonderful way to spend a day!

What’s in a name?

Posted on by RoseIW

This morning, I visited a local primary school – along with a fellow performer – to run a workshop on William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, one of the most done-to-death tragedies in the theatrical world.

We had been called in as representatives of a Shakespeare company to watch excerpts from the pupils’ abridged production of the play, to give feedback, to perform an excerpt ourselves and to run a few workshop games.

Romeoandjuliet1597We were under no illusions: if these children had suffered the endless analysis of metaphors, the constant drilling down to what Shakespeare might have ‘meant’ by every single line, then we were walking into a battle already lost.

Thank goodness, then, that their inspirational teacher – who I shall, for the purpose of this blog, reference only as ‘Mr C’ – whose job it was to teach these children about the bard had hit the mark with his performance-over-reading approach, and showed such belief in the talents of his class that each one’s voice rang out clear and confident as they delivered some of Shakespeare’s most challenging scenes of love, loss and sacrifice.

In a round of character hot-seating, in which the children asked my colleague and I questions and we had to answer as Romeo and Juliet, some of the questions were so deep, so unexpected, that we were almost caught off-guard.

“Describe Romeo in three words,” one said.

“How did you feel when you found out that Romeo had killed Tybalt?” asked another.

And from a third: “Don’t you think it’s weird that if Balthazar had got the message to Romeo on time, the ending could have been different? Do you blame him?”

Wow.

These young minds of just 9 and 10 years old were delving deep into the story, asking ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ and ‘what if?’ of the bard’s beloved play, rather than fixating on the technicalities of its language and structure.

This was a class that had been taught well. Shakespeare, as Mr C so rightly said, is for watching and performing, not reading and analysing.

Sit a 9-year-old in a classroom and tell them to read a play and tell you what it means and what will they learn apart from how to resent both the man responsible for writing it and the teacher responsible for inflicting it upon them?

Sit a 9-year-old in a theatre, or stand them on a stage, and tell them to watch, to speak, to feel, and they will learn confidence, they will ask questions and their faces will light up at the name of ‘Shakespeare’.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet. 

Juliet herself summed it up, really, when she gazed from her balcony into the night, lamenting the impact of a name on public or personal opinion. Romeo was a Montague, but she saw past that to the sweet, gentle soul of the man with whom she was to fall so desperately in love.

And so, in that vein, we must encourage the next generation to see past those who would have them believe that ‘Shakespeare’ is a synonym for ‘boring’, ‘complicated’ or ‘outdated’, and instead see his plays for what they are: pieces of theatre to be performed, felt and – above all else – loved.

What’s in a name?

Well, it’s all about how you say it.