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Campfires and Characters

Dramaturgy Workshop Day 5

One of the activities the cast was hoping to do was to sit around a campfire and roast marshmallows together, so we worked a campfire night into dramaturgy week. We set up a speaker with river sounds to create the environment of sitting next to a fire on the bank of a river, and—though we had S’mores rather than bacon, apples and biscuits—it felt as though we were in a scene of the play and sitting around the fire after a long day on the river (it had been a long day in our rehearsal boats).

After getting settled with our marshmallows we ran through one of the campfire scenes from the script. Then, to explore characters further, we built onto the scene by having the cast improvise in their characters. It was great exploration, and we learned so much about the characters and their relationships to one another.

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