All of our adventures this semester are centered in an enchanted forest. We’re imagining our actors gathering around the campfire telling stories in the dark. But where else might these stories lead? That’s what we set out to discover this week as we dove into Settings!

The Sunday ensemble gathers around their campfires.

This week’s check in question helped us think about different places: If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you travel? Many actors shared about wanting to visit friends or family in places like Arizona, Washington DC, California , and Poland. Some animal-loving ensemble members talked about going to places like Australia to see the kangaroos, Africa to see the many creatures on the savanna, or the rainforests in South America. And some of us travel trough our stomachs and talked about wanting to eat French food, sushi in Japan, or pasta in Italy. Rachel definitely is a gastronomical traveler - she said she most wants to go to Red Robin! Where would YOU like to go?

After check in, we played alone of our favorite ensemble games: On the Spot. In this game, we work to create a picture of a place together using our bodies and our voices. This helped activate our imaginations before we moved into our devising groups to talk about settings.

Last week, each of our ensembles imagined 4 unique characters ranging from Sphinxes to Selkies to Werewolves and Wendigoes. Using the ideas we generated in week #2, Our teaching artists thought about where some of these characters might find themselves - where do they call home, where do they want to go, or where might they visit on their travels? From there we came up wth 4 distinctive settings and asked our actors to help fill in the blanks by answering a few key questions such as:

How do you get to this place?
What is beautiful about this place?
What is dangerous about this place?

Working in small groups, each actor had a chance to answer 1 question about each setting. Devising can be hard because we have so many vivid imaginations, but we have to agree that no one person’s ideas are more important than any one else’s. We continued to practice our good ensemble skills of saying “yes” and building on to each other’s ideas. Take a peek at some of our settings below: