Liz Seymour at Theater Day Camp

Since 2001, I have been working at Young People's Theatre Workshop's Day Camp for grades 2 - 7.

The camp used to be 2 sessions for a total of 4 weeks (Two 2-week sessions) but now we've condensed it to 1 session of 2 weeks and we pack if full of fun.

It is a total blast!

Last year, we did a Day Camp revamp (as we coined it) to update the process. We made camp more of a process drama experience, allowing children to get an overall flavor of things, rather than drilling the same dance day after day. Now, we focus more on learning rather than performing. Although theater is a performance art, the process has proven to be the most important part to me and a great thing for young actors to focus on.

Day Camp ends this Friday and I will miss the children very much. It is such a warm and kind group. I hope they will be available to take classes with us in the fall (at YPTW.org).

We have oriented the program to focus on a musical or composing team each day. Today, we focused on Steven Schwartz. We watched a clip from the movie Enchanted, which involved the scene that That's How You Know occurs, and I'm doing that song on my CD! Then we split the children into groups and showed them a photograph from various Schwartz shows (Wicked, Rags, Pippin etc) and asked them to create a scene where each child had at least one line, the scene involved the emotion from the photograph, and the scene needs a beginning, middle, and end.

The children made some wonderful scenes! The group that was given a photograph from Wicked had all the characters dressed in green, so their scene revolved around Saint Patrick because the green make-up and costumes made them think of Saint Patrick. Great idea!

We took a break for snack after the acting exercise. Once snack was over, we sang Day by Day from Schwartz's musical Godspell. The children really liked the rock feel of the number. We also discussed meter because the song goes from 3/4 to 4/4 midsong.

Boy, those children learned a lot today!

We finished the day with our awesome camp song and Gina wrote the lyrics. The tune is to Bye Bye Birdie.

Bye Bye Campers, We're Gonna miss ya so

Bye Bye Campers, Why'd ya have to go?

We'll miss the acting games, The songs and dancing feet

But we will have more fun, The next time that we meet

Bye Bye Campers, We're gonna miss ya so

Bye Bye Campers, Now it's time to go!