Category Archives: Arts News

Wildlife Photographer Melissa Groo Kicks off Photographers’ Lecture Series

Melissa Groo will be on campus on January 19.
Melissa Groo will be on campus on January 19.

Award-winning wildlife photographer, writer, and conservationist Melissa Groo on January 19 will kick off Williston’s 2017 Photographers’ Lecture Series, which brings notable photographers to the Williston campus for a public lecture and in-depth classroom instruction for Williston students.

Groo began her career as a photographer after working in a number of diverse fields, including banking, education, modeling, and silversmithing. A passionate advocate for wildlife and an accomplished technical photographer, she quickly won prestigious assignments for leading photography magazines. She has completed three for Smithsonian Magazine, covering the great sandhill crane migration in Nebraska (March 2014), the rare spirit bear in Brittish Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest (September 2015), and the endangered Rothschild’s Giraffe in Uganda (forthcoming cover story, March 2017). Continue reading

Winter an Active Time for Williston Arts

Students are creating compelling abstract black and white compositions.
Students are creating compelling abstract black and white compositions.

Question: In this interstitial season when the fall play and concerts are complete and spring shows are a long way off, what’s going on in the the arts at Williston?

Answer: The arts are bustling in this “off” season!

Visual and Performing Arts Department Head Natania Hume notes that there is a buzz of activity right now in the arts. Documentary photo students recently took a field trip to MAP Gallery to meet with photographer Tracey Eller. The Caterwaulers, Williston’s male concert chorus, now has a critical mass of 30 voices and with all those basses can hit the low notes (the New Grove Dictionary of Opera defines the bass range as the E below middle C to the E above middle C). Winter dance revs up with student choreographers creating compelling and relevant work, including one celebrating the legacy of Black dancers and choreographers. And visual artists are hard at work starting with compositions in black and white.

“This in-between season is a ripe one for making art at Williston,” said Ms. Hume. “I always think of winter as a time when artists go inward and hunker down to create in earnest.”

The Caterwaulers are ready to sing low.

 

 

 

 

 

COMEDY OF ERRORS: Meet the Characters

There’s no denying it– Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is pretty confusing. Two sets of twins lead to mistaken identities and everyone (characters and audience alike) ends up a little lost. Our production makes things more confusing because almost all of the actors play more than one role. And to add one more layer to the production…all of our actors are playing actors in a theatre troupe that is putting on The Comedy of Errors (anyone who can guess why we made this choice will earn my undying respect for all time). When the theatre opens before each performance, you will have the opportunity to see the troupe warm up, set the stage and may even get a chance to take a picture with them in The Comedy of Errors photo booth. Continue reading

COMEDY OF ERRORS: Tech Week Begins

I mentioned collaboration in my last post. This is, truly, one of my favorite parts about being a theatre person. Tech Week for The Comedy of Errors began on Saturday and the power of collaboration was on full display.

For weeks the actors have  been rehearsing, the technicians have been building the set, and lighting designer Charles Raffetto and Costume Designer Ashley Tyler have been creating unique looks for the show. While we were working separately all of us had our eyes on the same prize: creating a cohesive, outlandish, ridiculous production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Our job was to stay true to Shakespeare and his influences, while bringing something new and fun to the table. Yesterday we got to see if our individual work came together in all the right ways. Needless to say, when I saw Ashley Tyler’s costume designs on the set Charles Raffeto designed, with the lights hung by tech theatre students, I did another happy dance. Continue reading

Comedy of Errors: The Ab Fab Collab

Theatre is an inherently collaborative genre. There is, quite literally, no way to do theatre alone. It’s only natural that the author of this blog post, Emily Ditkovski, Director of the Williston Theatre, would seek collaborators wherever she can.

The source material for our fall play, The Comedy of Errors, comes from two comedies by the Roman humorist Plautus, primarily The Menaechmi (cue Latin teacher Ms. Cody). The play is also heavily influenced, as devoted blog readers know, by commedia dell’arte (cue AP European History teacher Mrs. Klumpp). I reached out to my colleagues last spring  to see if we could work together. They agreed (cue Ms. D doing a happy dance.) Ms. Cody, an expert wordsmith, named this project The Ab Fab Collab(oration) and thus something truly exceptional was born. Continue reading

The Comedy of Errors: Shakespeare (Scholar) Visits the Cast

Dr. Adam Zucker, with his brown hair and long beard, is often mistaken for William Shakespeare himself. This is fitting, as he is Associate Professor in the English Department at UMass Amherst with a focus on Elizabethan Theatre.  We were lucky enough to host Dr. Zucker in the Williston Theatre on Wednesday to discuss The Comedy of Errors with the cast of our production.

He shared some fascinating scholarship with us, most notably that even in this most light-hearted of Shakespeare’s plays, the Bard still manages to ask deep, philosophical questions about belonging and family. Dr. Zucker began by reading his favorite lines from the play, Antipholus of Syracuse’s speech in Act I, Scene II:

I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:

So I, to find a mother and a brother,

In quest of them, unhappy lose myself. Continue reading

Comedy of Errors: The Rules of Comedy

For the outside observer, comedy seems like a chaotic and rambunctious art form. Rambunctious, yes. Chaotic, no. There are meticulous rules to comedy, much more so than drama, that are in place so that our audiences believe in the chaos that the characters are living through.

The first rule is “Yes, and…”  For those readers not familiar with improv (a genre of performing where players make up a scene as they go along), this means that when your partner adds something to a scene you agree with them and add something new. This rule is critical because it communicates to all players that collaboration is essential to good improv. No one is more important than the other. This rule is followed by play the truth of the scene, play at the top of your intelligence, and, one of my personal favorites, keep the stakes high. This structure gives comedians a framework in which to create their best work.

Saying “No, and…” or “Yes, but…” is a sure-fire way to kill a scene and also communicates to your scene partner that you are more important than they are.

Continue reading

Comedy of Errors: An Introduction

The Comedy of Errors was long thought to be Shakespeare’s first play. It is by far his shortest play with what, at first glance, seems like a very simple plot. All the evidence pointed to the fact that he was a new playwright who hadn’t developed fully as writer. However, scholars have since discovered that Comedy was first performed around 1594 (still early on in his career) at the hall of Gray’s Inn likely during Christmastime for an audience of nobleman and royalty.  The play’s brevity is due to the fact that it was an after piece– a short, boisterous comedy that completed a night of fun and merry-making typical of the Elizabethan holiday season.

The play was inspired by the great Italian Comedy of the Renaissance (commedia dell’arte) and the Roman comedies of Plautus. Anyone who has spent any time in the Williston Theatre knows that I love commedia dell’arte, the professional theatre troupes that grew out of the Renaissance. Almost all of the comedy we see today is derived, in one way or another, from commedia. These troupes were well-organized and often had women in charge (something that, even now, is a rarity in professional theatre). They roamed the countryside of Europe, creatively subverting the status quo by using improvisation, familiar stock characters, gibberish and broad comedy. Like today’s best stand-up comedians and sketch comedy artists, commedia poked fun at all of the things that were wrong with society. Audiences loved it, the government and the Catholic church did not.

An artitsts’ rendering of a commedia troupe performing in a town square.

Because commedia is the basis for all Western comedy (especially Shakespeare’s comedies, which were heavily influenced by commedia), I invited local commedia expert Brianna Sloane to lead a physical comedy workshop with the cast of The Comedy of Errors. Ms. Sloane is the artistic director of Theatre Truck, which crafts “mobile and site-specific  theatre sustainably and playfully.” Her current piece, The Water Project, is an interactive and immersive piece about the  communities that were flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir and will be performed at the Swift RIver Historical society later this month. She has studied commedia dell’arte at the Accedemia dell’Arte in Florence, Italy and holds an MFA in Directing from UMass Amherst. Her vibrant energy kept our actors engaged for the duration of the two-hour workshop!

After a terrific warm-up that involved lots of moving and shouting (like any good theatre warm up!), our actors got a chance to explore the major stock characters of commedia one at a time. Starting with the Zanni (the lowest of the servants who are struggling for basic survival) and all the way up  to the Lovers, the  cast could make connections between their characters and their commedia counterparts. The Comedy of Errors is incredibly physical. Without a basis to create the bodies of our characters, we would end up with a play that is  boring and doesn’t stay true to Shakespeare’s intentions. We look forward to applying all of the wonderful and wacky things we learned in our workshop to the rehearsal process as we bring the show to life. When you come see the play, try and see which commedia character influenced each actor! See below to learn more about some of the stock characters of commedia.

ARLECHINO

Arlechino, one of the most famous characters in commedia, is a servant trying to survive. With his wily imagination he gets himself in and out of heaps of trouble. He is pictured here with the slapstick that his master, no doubt, will beat him with for messing up one task or another.

COLUMBINA

Columbina is a strong, witty, servant who knows more than anyone in the play. She is often the object of Arlechino’s affections.

 

PANTALONE

Pantalone is also very well known and is the basis for lots of contemporary comedy (think Mr. Burns from The Simpsons). He is an old man with lots of money that he doesn’t want to lose. Most of his plots revolve around trying to marry off his daughter so he can make even more money. Pantalone’s female counterpart, El Strega, is nearly forgotten. An old witch with magical powers, her distant relatives can be seen in fairy tales like Snow White.

IL DOTTORE

Il Dottore is Pantalone’s nemesis. A doctor who knows virtually nothing and speaks nonsense, he is usually the father to the son of whomever Pantalone is trying to marry his daughter.

 

CAPITANO

Perhaps my favorite character in commedia, Capitano brags of having done the most brave and terrifying things in battle, but when push comes to shove he is afraid of everything. All characters in commedia posses some kind of duality along these lines.

 

INNAMORATI (THE LOVERS)

The lovers, central to all commedia plots, are obsessed with themselves only slightly more than their love-interests.

 

To learn more about Theatre Truck visit http://www.thetheatretruck.com/

Tickets for The Comedy of Errors will go on sale in early October. Visit http://williston.com/theater for more information.

 

Theatre Season 2016-2017

School is back in session and the theatre building is already teeming with life. Lots of students, old and new, have excitedly found their way back to the studio theatre inquiring about auditions for the fall play (which are TONIGHT– we waste no time here!). It seems fitting then, for us to announce the season to a broader audience so you can get as excited as we are. Without further ado, here are the plays for the 2016-2017 school year!

 

FALL PLAY:  THE COMEDY OF ERRORS by William Shakespeare

To celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Williston is producing one of the Bard’s most outlandish and ridiculous works. The Comedy of Errors is a raucous and hilarious play that follows two sets of twins who were separated at birth in a sea-storm. Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant, Dromio of Syracuse, arrive in Ephesus, which turns out to be the home of their long-lost twin brothers, Antipholus of Ephesus and his servant, Dromio of Ephesus. When the Syracusans encounter the friends and families of their twins, a series of wild mishaps based on mistaken identities leads to a near-seduction, arrests, and accusations of infidelity, theft, madness, and demonic possession. Inspired by both the Roman humorist Plautus, and commedia dell’arte of the Italian Renaissance, The Comedy of Errors is truly comedy at its best. In light of this, we are planning special collaborations with our Latin and AP European History students, so stay tuned for more info about that!

October at 27 and 29th at 7:30pm, October at 28th at 8pm. Join us for a talk-back after the show on Thursday October 27th. The performance on October 28th is free for Williston Families.

WINTER THEATRE LAB

Have you ever wondered what happens when you ask a bunch of theatre students to collaborate on a series of one-act plays? Well, it’s pretty fabulous and we call that THEATRE LAB. Students direct, act, design, and stage manage four short plays which gives them a 360 degree look at what goes into theatre-making. Look out for an exciting new twist this year and the names of our four directors!

February 23-25 at 7:30pm.

SPRING PLAY: PETER AND THE STARCATCHER. Written By Rick Elice. Based on the Novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Music by Wayne Barker

Based on the popular novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, Peter and the Starcatcher follows the adventures of a nameless orphan and his new-found friend Molly Aster as they keep a secret treasure safe and out of the hands of the pirate-villain Black Stache. Set on the high seas and a remote island, Peter and the Starcatcher takes its audiences on a magical adventure as we meet lords, orphans, mermaids, sea creatures, and pirates. The story, which serves as a prequel to J.M. Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy, is theatre magic at its best and guaranteed to touch the hearts of audiences ages 9-99.

April 27-29 and May 4-6 at 7:30pm. Please join us for a talk-back with our cast and crew on Friday April 28th. That evening’s performance is also free for Williston Families.

 

 

For ticket information for these productions visit www.williston.com/theater. Tickets will go on sale approximately four weeks before opening.

Three Win ‘My Life’ Photo Contest

Three student photographers won gift cards to Tandem Bagels for images they submitted to the “My Life” photography contest. Mr. Hing runs the contest each year and the winners were as follows: first place, Ben Chmieleweski ’16; second place, Brad Budman ’16; and third place, Sarah Wiegandt ’16.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all who entered!

First place photo by Ben Chmielewski '16
First place photo by Ben Chmielewski ’16
Second place photo by Brad Budman '16
Second place photo by Brad Budman ’16
Third place photo by Sarah Wiegandt '16
Third place photo by Sarah Wiegandt ’16