Our First Zoom Workshop!
We recently taught our first all-online Zoom workshop - and it was awesome!
We taught 2 groups of students from a high school in New York. Each group had 6 sessions with us (45 minutes each session) and made videos as their final project. I was a bit nervous about teaching a physical form completely online, however we were determined to not just make it work on Zoom but to utilize Zoom to do fun explorations and make things we couldn’t if it was live.
Tut’Zanni has been playing with masked performance on video for a few years now. We’ve been surprised with the results. Commedia dell’arte, as a theatrical form, has always pushed against structures and boundaries, so I guess it makes sense that when given new kinds of restrictions, new games can be played. To start with, when you only a screen to work within, you have to find new/fun/interesting ways to enter and exit into a scene.
The students ran with us, and since the world of screens is no stranger to them, they leaned right into it. We had characters blowing fuses to black out the screen, popping in from the sides, we even had students pretending to hand items from one screen to another. It was so fun to explore and watch them be inventive, which I believe is the heart of Commedia, masked performance and the type of performance we like to teach.
There were definitely some challenges, as I’m sure any teacher can attest to. When you’re not in the same room as your students, gauging their energy levels and engagement is really, really hard. You have to look for new cues, and you have to encourage yourself. You are often staring at a bunch of people sitting at a computer screen, somewhat expressionless (think about how you probably look when you’re just watching or reading something on a screen). However, we learned when they kept their screens on, stayed visible, and even asked questions along the way, were all good signs. And obviously, the work they produced showed that they were paying close attention.
Partway through the process, we had the students practice some exercises on their own time and capture their exploration on camera. Those videos were shared in a space online where everyone could watch each other’s work and give feedback. This may be something we (the Tut’Zanni team) keep for the future. Peer feedback is integral to all our exercises, and is incredibly helpful to devising work (how you provide feedback is important, as well, but we went over that).
We had gone over a lot of options for a final project. Commedia and masked performance is usually performed in person, it is physical and responsive to the audience. So how do we bring those elements into a digital space and keep the energy high? After much debate, we landed on video submissions (and a group sharing) for their final pieces. We were nervous, but happily surprised that this did turn out to be a fantastic option. It gave the students a medium that was a bit less pressure than a live performance, being able to film something, edit or redo parts they were less confident about, and gave them a space they could open up within and be wild. The videos were all so different, and so fun. They included their “audience” with the camera, played with their space, their masks, their bodies, their voices - the results were amazing characters playing and listening to each other.
I’m looking forward to continuing this journey - we’ve been working on recorded digital workshops and we’re continuing our own recorded performances. I’m super excited to see it all roll out, soon!
- ALi