College offers creative summer programs for high school students

by Christopher Hennessy

Two unique summer programs will bring dozens of area high schoolers to campus this summer to learn the crafts of writing and acting. The programs, administered by the Office of Continuing Education, begin in July.

Just write it! The Summer Writing Program for High School students is a five-week program in which teenagers will work on creative and analytical writing skills through courses in poetry, fiction, essay writing, screenwriting or magazine writing.

This is the program’s second year after the success of the pilot program last year. This year organizers hope about 25 students will enroll.

The program is for the student “who really loves to write but doesn’t have an outlet,” says program director Tori Weston ’98, MFA ’04.

Feeling isolated as a teenage writer is an experience Weston can relate to, and helped motivate her to propose and create the program herself. (An Emerson graduate student at the time, Weston asked her fellow students about their high school experiences and what they wish they had experienced. From these conversations she developed the curriculum.)

Weston, who is also the adult degree coordinator in Continuing Education, points out that this program fills a void – there were no summer high school programs in the Boston area that focused on creative writing, she said. The program’s classes will focus on fundamental writing exercises, finding ways to spark the imagination, and learning the terminology and vocabulary of creative writing, “which is not really taught in high schools,” she notes.

She says the program also offers an introduction to ‘workshopping’ in order “to help students become more comfortable with criticism.” Faculty also teach students how to write about themselves and their experiences and introduce them to writers who are not only contemporary but “preferably under 35,” Weston explains.

The students’ work culminates in a published anthology and a public reading for parents and relatives.

Last year, Weston reports, “the instructors were highly impressed by the students’ work.” Instructor Stace Budzko recalls stories “with characters that were so complex and unexpected, I told the kids, ‘I’m stealing that!’” Budzko, who is also an adjunct professor at Emerson and an instructor for the local Grub Street Writers Workshops, says, “It’s really important to establish [in the class] that they are writers. Some of them have been writing for years already. We’re just talking as writer to writer.”

In addition, Weston explains, the students feel comfortable with a younger faculty, and the graduate student instructors get valuable experience teaching writing. “It’s a win-win situation.”

Just act it!

Personal attention and a tailored curriculum – that’s what the newly revamped Emerson Summer Stage for High School Students will offer, say organizers. The long-popular program returns to campus this year after a two-year hiatus and has been significantly restructured to focus more on high school-age students and on scene study and audition preparation.

This year students will enroll for a four-week course of study, developing acting skills and learning monologues for auditions. The program is limited to 18 students from 10th, 11th or 12th grades (as of September 2005). Students will be guided through voice and movement, scene study and monologue presentation and even Shakespeare.

“The goal is for each student to come out with two monologues – a contemporary and a classical piece,” says Courtney O’Connor, MA ’97, program director and Emerson adjunct faculty member in performing arts.

Students will attend several two-hour classes throughout the day, Mondays through Thursdays, and then participate in “master classes” on Fridays. Each Friday they will choose an area of study such as stage combat, musical-theater acting or improvisation.

The month of study will culminate with two showcases, a monologue and 15- to 20-minute-long scenes of three and four actors that faculty will have specially selected for the students, “tailored for and based on their interests and talents,” O’Connor explains. “If we have three kids who love Beckett, then let’s get a scene from Waiting for Godot in there,” she adds.

The showcases will enable the students “to take what they’re learning” and present it to an audience, “as opposed to simply filling a part,” O’Connor explained.

Program faculty believe that audition preparation can be especially useful for students who hope to apply to college acting programs like the one offered by Emerson.

“It gives them a leg up and a feeling of security in themselves and the work they’re presenting,” O’Connor believes.

Faculty will include Associate Professor Kathleen Donohue and adjunct professors O’Connor and Joe Antoun, MA 91, director of the Emerson New Works Festival. Two Emerson theater-education graduate students will act as “coaches” who will follow the students through their courses and “will really be an active part of their moment-to-moment progress,” said O’Connor.

The Summer Writing program for high school students runs July 11, 2005-Aug. 12; the Summer Stage program runs July 11, 2005-Aug. 5.