A group of young actors strutted their stuff on stage last Friday. July 10 was the final day of practice and the date of the performance for the first of several classes participating in the 2015 Souris Valley Summer Theatre Camp. Seventeen students in the ages six to eight class, the first of several set to take place in the coming weeks, took to the stage and performed a play they crafted up together from their own imaginations.
“I like this year better than the first year I attended, because we can make up our own stories. Last year there were lines for us and we only got to say a couple of lines,” said returning student Isabelle Semeniuk. “We also get to decorate our own costumes.”
Matthew Gillies, another camp-goer, agreed: “I like that we get to choose our own line and choose our characters. I like that we also have lots of games out here.”
This performance was the result of spending the week, heading up to that point, hard at work practicing all the necessary techniques and aspects of acting under the guidance of camp coordinators Josh Pelé and Blair Wrubleski.
Before the lunchtime performance by the class, Pelé expressed how impressed he was with the creativity of all the participants. He and Wrubleski worked with the students all week and found them to be quite talented.
“It’s incredible, seeing some of the returning students this year, and how much they’ve improved throughout the years. They came up with this show; all of the lines they say in the show, they made up themselves,” said Pelé. “They even wrote a song this year, at the end of the show. The amount of talent in these 6 to 8 year-olds is just insane.”
Friday’s performance was a unique mix of several fairy tales: a group of humans ended up getting stranded in a mythical realm of Candy Land, searching for treasure with the help of a wolf and the local gummy-bears.
The prior week’s camp activities were focused on the cultivation of skills, with instructors and students working as a team, playing games with the specific goal in mind of building necessary skills for performance arts.
The games were meant to build skills in character development and voice projection. They included the “Sound Machine,” in which students were instructed to make a sequence of noises together, practicing being heard, while properly projecting their voices.
Another game practiced was “Wink Murderer,” a game that required participants to practice their sleuthing skills to figure out the identity of a secret “murderer,” who makes others lie down with a quick wink.
The camp is currently in its first of three weeks for the ages nine to 13 class, the ages 13-16 class, and the new Encore Camp, a camp for those aged 10 to 16, who missed prior camps.
“The other camps are going to be a bit different, working on individual skills, rather than creating a group collective piece,” said Pelé. “We’ll still have a big performance at the end, but it’ll be more of a variety show than a collective piece all together.”
