FALL WORKSHOPS ~ OVERVIEWCharacter Voices and Drawing from Life & Imagination workshops are FREE to Across Roads members. If you aren’t a member yet, and choose to join when signing up for a workshop ($25 membership fee, in lieu of workshop fee), your membership will be extended for the 2016 calendar year. |
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| Drawing from Life & Imagination | Character Voices |
| This workshop will focus on learning and honing drawing skills, including activities for any level while we work from observation and imagination. |
How do you capture the rhythm, the word choices, the signifying phrases, the slang and verbal hiccups of a specific character and get them down on paper? This workshop excites writing students of all ages. It is a gateway to comedy and also to serious character exploration and differentiation.
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| Joy Spontak | David Schein |
| 11/14, 9:30-11:30am | 11/7, 9:30-noon |
| Enrollment $15 in advance or $20 @ door | Enrollment $10 in advance or $15 @ door |
| Materials included | Materials included |
| The Grange Hall – Howard Street, Waterbury Center, VT | Waterbury Congregational Church – 8 N. Main St. Waterbury VT (back entrance) |
REGISTRATION & PAYMENT INFO
Payment: To enroll in a workshop, simply send a check with your full name, phone number, email address and enrollment fee to: Across Roads Center for the Arts PO Box 102 Waterbury, VT 05676. To pay online, click the yellow DONATE button to the right and make your payment with credit or debit card.
*If paying at the door, only cash and check will be accepted*
Rates: Advance class rates apply up to ONE WEEK prior to the workshop date. If you are registering the week of, you will be charged the “at the door” rate.
Member rates: Enrollment fees are waived for Across Roads members, however; members should enroll in advance by sending a quick email to info.acrossroads@gmail.com saying which workshops you plan to attend.
Refunds: If Across Roads cancels a workshop for any reason, you will be refunded in full. No other refunds will be granted.
Locations: Locations of workshops to be confirmed by email, and posted on our website and Facebook as the date approaches. All workshops will be held in Waterbury or Waterbury Center, VT.
Questions? Email us at info.acrossroads@gmail.com
FULL WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
Scaring is Caring!
Halloween is a great time to get creative and let your imagination run wild. Partner up with your grandparent or grandchild to make this workshop extra special. Everyone will design and create their own Halloween or autumn themed window or door decorations, right in time for scaring friends, neighbors, parents and siblings! Whether you have plans to hand out candy, go trick-or-treating, or pretend you’re not at home, there’s room to explore the fun of the season with cut paper, paint and good old fashioned cardboard. All materials provided, suggested $3 materials fee.
Drawing From Life and Imagination
In this workshop we will focus on learning drawing skills, including activities for any skill level, while we work from observation and imagination. We will also learn how to appreciate our own aesthetic sensibility and that of all others in the group. Open to all ages and experience levels.
Character Voices
How do you capture the rhythm, the word choices, the signifying phrases, the slang and verbal hiccups of a specific character and get them down on paper? Conscious listening is of course important, but you’ve been listening to distinct people all your life. How can you remember them? I’ve had great success using acting improv exercises to liberate a character – and then writing from the character’s voice.
In this workshop you will find a body, a pitch range, and importantly a face (that shapes how you use all your articulators) and then begin talking in a mock interview format. It’s uncanny and a little spooky – how you can channel a character by hold your body and face differently from how you do normally. When you start to speak, someone else is talking. We’ll work out this way physically for 45 minutes, talking extempore, and then you will write as you try on different characters and speak/ mumble to yourself.
This workshop will enhance character development in participants writing. They will find a way to develop a character’s voice and apply it to first person narrative as well as to dialogue – in their poetry, prose and playwriting. It is a gateway to comedy and also to serious character exploration and differentiation. Students should come prepared to get physical as you find out what strangers live inside you and to speak and write as them. This workshop excites writing students of all ages.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTORS
Rachael Lorimer is a visual artist with a passion for community and people. She holds a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and served as President of the Board for Across Roads from 2012-2014. Rachael’s abstract drawings and paintings reflect her love of plants and nature, but when she’s not in the studio she can be found participating in arts events that require fanfare, creativity, masks, crowns, costumes and more, because fun is fantastic! www.rachaelsophrin.com
Joy Spontak is a visual artist who has exhibited her work widely and taught in a variety of settings during the past 35 years. Joy holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College of Norwich University and has taught children and adults at The Helen Day Art Center, for the Adult Degree Program at Vermont College where she was artist-in-residence, for teens at workshops for the Washington County Youth Service Bureau, in nursing homes, which included elementary school students painting with elders through a grant from the VT Council on the Arts, and many more venues. She loves working with all skill levels and ages, and her teaching method allows students to feel safe, not judged and open to experiencing the joy of their innate creativity while learning a new skill.
David Schein is a writer, theater artist and teacher. He studied poetry under Marvin Bell and Anselm Hollo at the University of Iowa. His writing career has run the gambit from writing for Whoopi Goldberg to creating NPR radio shows in Tijuana, Mexico. He was a touring poet for the Vermont Arts Council, has taught writing at the New England Young Writer’s Conference at Breadloaf, with Vermont Teachers Who Write, and, with Geof Hewitt, at the Vermont Governor’s Institute of the Arts. Schein co-founded the Act Write program with Free Street Programs in Chicago and, for the Arts Council for Chautauqua County, established the Ripley Writes program, which integrated creative writing through the curriculum of a small rural school district in Ripley, NY. His book of performance poems, “My Murder and Other Local News,” was published by Fomite Press in 2014, his performance monologue “Out Comes Butch” was published in West Coast Plays and his article, “Incident in Awassa,” was published in the American Theater Reader – a compilation of “best’ pieces published in American Theater Magazine over the last 25 years. He has taught at colleges, schools and community centers and founded and directed a variety of arts organizations in urban and rural USA and in Africa. Current projects include a musical “Hotball” written with Geof Hewitt and “The Adoption,” a novel about an Ethiopian adoption.