Sense and Nonsense was the second in the Learning to Look Series. The objectives here were to introduce Dada and Surrealism to the kids and to reinforce the concepts of formal analysis.
This session had the most successful activity component, which made up for the lackluster discussion aspect. The kids got really into the collage. Fewer chose to do the exquisite corpse exercise, but every kid chose one of the proposed activities. I think it was the fact that they got to use glue that really made it fun, so in the future I will try to chose craft projects that involve collage. The kids remembered some of the terms from the week before and partially remembered the order they went in, so I consider the reinforcement of formal analysis techniques a success. If I were to do a session like this again, I would also include a collage based surrealism activity.
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Art in Motion was the first in the Learning to Look series that I ran at the Harrison Public Library. It was aimed at kids ages 6-12 but was designed to also be interesting to any caregivers or parents that accompanied them to the session. The topic was the ways turn of the 20th century artists depicted movement. The objectives were to familiarize the kids with the major concerns of the Impressionist and Italian Futurist movements and to introduce the process of formal visual analysis.
Of the whole series, I think this one went the best. The first painting was clearly representational and they really got into looking at the formal elements of the painting and how they come together to tell a story. The second painting is more abstract, but was chosen because it features a train to tie in to HPL's popular "Train Time" programming which draws a lot of folks from the community. Kids love trains. Once the train was found in the morass of colors and shapes, they got excited about identifying and analyzing the formal elements. The activity portion of the hour was fun but not as effectively connected to the art as I would have liked. The craft prompt was to draw or create something that they thought invoked movement with the suggestion that they think about a time in their lives where there is a lot of motion like getting ready in the morning or recess. Most of the kids went the path of just making whatever they felt like. However, it doesn't feel like a total failure because the kids had fun. In assessing the success of the event, I am proud to say that both the parents and the kids got involved. The kids started using a lot of the formal vocabulary in identifying the elements of the painting over the course of the hour and the parents got involved by asking questions about the artists and the context of the paintings. The kids asked probing questions about the context as well and, in the case of the first image, were able to construct the concerns of the art movement from the formal elements of the painting with little prompting. The futurist painting was a little more challenging but they grappled with it really well. In the future, I would more clearly direct the activity, perhaps by limiting the materials available for crafting, to encourage them to do the activity as designed. I want it to still be open ended, especially for the younger kids, but I also want to drive home the concerns of the movements through the activity. In Spring of 2017 I was elected artistic director of U of C Commedia, which meant that I was in charge of planning and implementing a 10-week training course in fall to teach our new members movement, mask work, and improv theater basics. From this experience I learned a lot about structuring a long term instruction plan and about ways to encourage people to be silly together.
One of the things that was most successful was the flexibility of the schedule. I built in some redundancies so that if folks missed one day they would still get all the information they needed and in case I needed to cancel a rehearsal we wouldn't fall behind. The most successful individual training session was in week 7 when we wrote the showcase scenario together. The noobs (our official term for them in the bylaws of the organization) learned how to write a scenario by reading two successful shows that we had previously performed and then by thinking through the different parts of each show. We then thought about how each noob wanted to introduce their character to the larger performing arts community. With their newfound understanding of the structure of a Commedia Scenario and keeping in mind our discussion they dictated to me while I wrote down what they said on the chalk board. After they wrote their show, we did a pass through to make sure that all the loose ends were tied up and to be sure everyone accomplished their goals for their character. Not only did this give them ownership over the final product of their 10 weeks of training but also created a crop of people who were able to write shows for the group this year. One of the things I would do differently would be to ease into the serious training. We started doing serious Commedia stuff in second week before the noob class had really gotten to know each other and that meant that they were uncomfortable doing silly things in a serious way. In the moment, I switched back to doing fun, silly improv exercises before switching back to serious training to give time to get comfortable experimenting and being silly. This was extremely beneficial for them, so in the future I would plan to do that rather than have the first movement day be so early since it was a bit of a wash without that willingness to experiment. In the library setting, this would mean establishing a tone that promoted experimentation and a light atmosphere in the beginning in a more intentional way than I may have in the past. |
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