Young performing arts students learn skills of the stage at camp
The Hot Springs School District continued its summer enrichment series of camps this week, with the Trojan Performing Arts Camp for grades K-6 held at the Hot Springs Junior Academy.
The camp, which began Monday, July 25, and ended on Friday with a grand finale performance from the kids, followed last week’s first session for grades 7-12. Both groups of students took vocal, dance and theater classes over the course of the five days, while focusing on plays and musicals chosen by the program for the coming school year.
Along with 34 students in attendance this week, several high school and junior high performing arts students and adult volunteers were on hand to aid the students.
Camp director, Kristen McCauley, a sixth-grade math and science teacher at Main Street Visual and Performing Arts Magnet School, noted this is the first year for the camp to be held.
“The district gave us, kind of, a blanket, if anybody’s interested in doing some enrichment,” she said Thursday. “And I think it’s been a pretty cool opportunity to see different teachers come out of where they’re set in the district, with things they’re also comfortable doing (in addition to the class subjects they teach). So I thought it would be fun to do a K-6 visual and performing arts camp.”
She further noted the opportunity the camp provided in allowing students from all four elementary schools in the district to meet theater, dance and choir teachers at the junior academy.
“They get some face time with them to help build on what they’ve done in the elementary level, and help make that segue, to keep more kids in the arts as they move into the upper level,” she said. “There’s a lot of really creative people in this group. So we had a rotation where they’re learning through games about some foundational theater ideas, some terminology, and things
that they would need, even up to doing this as a profession.
“They’re doing the exact same thing with dance and with the music, and then they’re making their own costumes.”
The students also learned how to take on different characterizations aside from their principal role.
“They’re learning a lot of really cool things, and we kind of just did intensified versions of all different things, so they could all come together into a performance on the last day.”
The theme for the camp this summer is “Trojan Pride Rock,” in which the students put on a performance of “The Lion King” Friday afternoon. Singing and dancing to four different, scaled-down versions of numbers from the original Disney score, each grade level rotation had a different song to perform.
“They’ll all come together, so we all are cohesive in the theme,” she said. “But they all have individual songs that they’re getting to do.”
The kids did dress rehearsals on Thursday to ensure they felt comfortable on Friday when they performed in front of their families and the rest of the crowd. McCauley said the camp is definitely something they plan to continue in the coming years, even though the details may look a little different.
“The district is basically going to look at all the enrichment camps — see what worked and what didn’t. Maybe see what things can be combined or extended and look at, of course, where funding goes from that. It’s going to be interesting to see and get some feedback from parents and families, once we get that on social media, as to what they enjoyed and what we can see, especially in the next couple of years, where these older kids (will be). Does it help facilitate seeing those faces? We also have some student workers,” she said.
She noted she took it upon herself to take the initiative of getting the older students involved, as well.
“There’s something about seeing your peers that aren’t really your peers — older brothers and sisters — doing the things that you might have been scared to do,” she said. “So they’re getting their thespian hours coming and volunteering here as well, so you’ll see some high school and junior high students that are also getting to invest in these kids. And they were just their age just a year or two ago — pretty neat.”
McCauley said she would also like to lengthen the daily sessions, possibly in the future, and incorporate a broader focus on the behind-the-scenes aspects of a production.
“They couldn’t do what they do without the people backstage and the sound guy and the lighting guy. So I’m looking at maybe bringing those elements in as well,” she said.