A YEAR LATER

My experience of the OSF Summer Seminar for High School Juniors

 

A roomful of people I don’t know. They are shouting my name, arms spread, joyful grins on their faces. They will be my leaders for the next two weeks, but right now they are just happy to see me. I am sped through the check in process because I am late. Armed with room key, meal card, and folder, I face the most nerve-wracking part of this—the line check. A slightly bored-looking Senior Assistant pulls the colorful key sheets from the air and tells me to begin whenever I’m ready. I take a deep breath, and forget everything.

“Uh—line?” I ask sheepishly. He quickly gives me the first few words, and with them the rest flow back into my brain and I rattle off the Shakespeare, the Oedipus, the monologues and scenes that I have practiced eighty-four thousand times. When I am finished, he smiles and tells me I did fine, much better than others, don’t forget to review Romeo & Juliet. One of them gives me directions to my room—no dinner for me, I’m too late for that. I’m the last student to arrive.

This is the first of fourteen days, two blissful weeks, of dance and theatre workshops where so much information is crammed into my head that I can’t sleep at night because it’s all still scampering around behind my eyes, trying to be sorted and classified for storage. I replay the day’s events in my mind, even as I regurgitate them into my journal (sometimes. We often return to the dorms long after lights out, and 15 minutes is never enough to write all that has happened during the day).

How does one summarize the experiences of Seminar? With abstract phrases or minute details—in thoughts, ideas, events, or something else? This is the question that plagues me as I write this; I don’t know exactly what you want from me. I suppose anyone can give you a copy of the schedule and tell you what we did, but it is a more difficult thing to judge the impact that these happenings have had upon us. Perhaps this is the route I will take.

When I went into the Summer Seminar for High School Juniors, I was afraid. I was quiet, shy, and nervous, all potentially fatal problems for a budding actress. I was unable to use my diaphragm, terrified of working in a group of people I wasn’t familiar with, and most of all I had no self-confidence.

When I came out of the Summer Seminar, I had finally discovered my lungs. I was part of a team, a cohort of people my age or a little older, many of whom were more experienced than I. I learned from them. I acknowledged that I wasn’t a perfect actress, but I was okay with that and ready to fight towards improvement. I was surer than ever that I wanted to pursue theatre in college. When I left Seminar, I left knowing that I had made someone’s life a little better and I left knowing what a strong impact theatre arts can have on audiences’ lives.

Though at the time, the social aspects of Seminar seemed most memorable, I find that it is the more academic parts of the program I use the most. For instance, the skills I learned in the Movement & Masks workshop constantly keep me aware of where my body is and what it’s doing onstage, and the ways different masks affect my behavior and movement.

Many of the lectures were reviewing information that I had already learned, either through theatre classes or my own experience, but others were completely new to me. I desperately wish I had taken notes on the Renaissance Dance workshop when the local renaissance faire rolled around! How was I to know I’d need to know how to dance a branle?

Even now, a year and a month later, certain songs make me cry. I mouth the words to our scenes as others perform them. A movement, a gesture, a face reminds me of Seminar and the tears or laughter bubble up. I speak to my home-friends of Semmies and the love place, and they look at me confused until I explain. They were not a part of all this with me—they did not share the experiences that made sixty people into best friends. There are a thousand things that remind me of Seminar—I am always finding more. The ticket stubs scattered around my room; “Run River Run” on the radio; chocolate milk; most of all, the city where all this took place.

I’ve visited Ashland four or five times since the Seminar—in three days I will be living in the SOU dorms as a student. Every time I walk past Suzy Homes I look up into the lounge and remember the late-night singalongs. There will be other past Semmies joining me at college, some whom I knew well and some I was not as close to. Some of us will study theatre, and others will not, but all of us treasure our memories of the Seminar.