Young Playwrights Festival Seminar Series Begins
This morning we kicked off the first session of our Young Playwrights seminar series, sponsored by Baltimore Center Stage. The Young Playwrights Festival is a yearly event hosted by Center Stage in which hundreds of students grades K-12 write and submit a 10-minute play for review. Finalists whose plays are chosen get to revise their plays with a playwright mentor, and the plays are performed professionally. This year, the theme that the student plays must include is “Seize the Day”. The plays must also incorporate a ball, a wall, and a fall. These criteria may be incorporated literally or metaphorically into the story/props.
As participants in the Young Playwrights seminar, TCS students will be reading their scripts out loud at the end of the seminar series in addition to submitting their work to the competition. To prepare the TCS students to read and submit their original plays, our instructor Parker Matthews will lead 9 seminar sessions focusing on creative writing, self expression, and storytelling. Using a combination of acting exercises and lectures/brainstorming activities, Mr. Parker will teach the students about the elements of a good play to help them get started writing their own. Mr. Parker, originally from Oregon, is a teacher, actor, storyteller, and mime. His training is very physically engaged and he will be incorporating many physical activities into the seminar classes.
The class today started with a gesture game to learn names. The students went around a circle saying their name in combination with a gesture, and the rest of the students would copy the gesture and say the name. Then, they did an activity called “this is not”. The students passed around an object, like a tennis racket, and declared, “this is not a tennis racket, this is a ___” while acting out whatever object they pretended to have. Next, Mr. Parker reviewed the seminar guidelines- everyone has the right to be free from emotional and physical harm, everyone has the right to express their opinions, and everyone has a responsibility to participate. These guidelines are very in line with the TCS honor code, placing importance on participation and respect.
To start thinking about writing plays the students discussed what they think a play is and what makes up a play. The students threw out ideas including emotions, acting, story, live performance, script, sound, characters, costumes, props, and sets. They also discussed the differences between characters and story. At the end of class, they played a free-association word game in which they tossed a ball around the circle and said a word that came to mind based on the last word spoken. To wrap up, the students created a three sentence story from some of the words they thought of in their brainstorming session. The first session of this unique nine week seminar really started to get our creativity flowing, and we are very excited to hear the students’ original plays in December. Thank you so much, Mr. Parker and Baltimore Center Stage for making this opportunity possible!