Summer Camp Gives Me Hope for Virtual Theater

Featuring Radioactive Soup, Fairies, and a Cat Show

Fairy drawn by Zé

​For anyone hoping to stretch their theatrical muscles during the pandemic, I suggest the following exercise:
- Improvise a skit
- With actors who aren’t in the same room as you
- In French
- On a Zoom call with 50 kids
- Most of whom don’t speak French
 
These are unusually specific limitations. But, as Chil Kong (Artistic Director of Adventure Theater) said at the DC Theatre Summit in January, narrow parameters produce innovative work. I saw this firsthand as a virtual French counselor at Lac du Bois this summer.    
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Lac du Bois, an immersion program in northern Minnesota, uses performance as a language teaching tool. Theater is present in the skits that introduce the day’s menu, in the gestures used to teach songs, and in the over-arching simulation of the program itself. But the most traditionally theatrical moment of the day is Plaisirs d’amour, a “soap opera” performed by counselors in nightly installments. Anticipated by TV-starved campers and attention-hungry staff alike, Plaisirs d’amour has satirized movies and books, featured unforgettable characters and ridiculous plot lines, and ended since time immemorial with its actors jumping fully clothed into Turtle River Lake. It’s a treasured part of the day at Lac du Bois, and this summer we were faced with adapting it to an online format.
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Just as Kong predicted, narrow parameters spurred innovation for the team of writers and actors devising these virtual performances, which included my colleagues Vanessa, Zé, Marion, Benoît, Sebastien, Emmy, Eliénore, Issac, Edouard, Aurelie, Cécile, and Sido.

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 Inspired by a choose-your-own adventure production I saw at Imagination Stage, I suggested using the poll function on Zoom to make Plaisirs d’amour interactive. One week, I co-wrote a cooking competition with my colleague Marion. After each episode, the campers voted on which of the larger-than-life contestants should advance to the next round. Ultimately, the mad scientist Dr. Ingrédients swept the competition with radioactive soup and the bread-based monster pain-kenstein. He was rewarded during the finale with (self-inflicted) whipped cream to the face.

​​A few weeks later, after watching the parade of horrors that is Cats (2019), I wrote a cat themed Plaisirs d’amour. By this time, we had adopted a hybrid performance method: we acted the first and final episodes live over Zoom on Tuesday and Friday, while the middle two were pre-recorded and played via screen share. This worked particularly well for the cat storyline. On the first day, I took advantage of the blurred home/camp boundaries and had counselors enter their cats into a cat show. I even had my dad call in with my cat, Max, who tragically lost the poll to a dog wearing cat ears. 

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At Lac du Bois' Virtual French Language Village this summer, the cooking got a little experimental (at least in this culinary competition). Have you ever tried to animate food?! * * * #livethelanguage #french #frenchimmersion #frenchlanguage #francophone #cuisine #frenchcamp #cookingcompetition #culinaryarts #drama #skit #improv #humor

A post shared by Concordia Language Villages (@conclangvillage) on Aug 20, 2020 at 5:05am PDT

Léa, a returning camper, enters her rabbit Kiwi into the virtual pet show.

​For the second and third episodes, I took advantage of the pre-recorded format to splice together a brilliantly improvised montage of the protagonist, Minou, training to enter the competition (Minou, it should be noted, was played by Zé, the same genius behind Dr. Ingrédients). For the final episode on Friday, campers entered their own pets, who danced to French music in their respective Zoom squares. Shockingly, Minou still topped the poll, with campers pointing out in the chat that he deserved the win due to his rigorous training regimen.

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Minou (played by Zé) trains for the cat show.

Minou (Zé) and M. Moustache (Edouard) call a "human" guardian (Matilda and Sido).

​I co-wrote the final week of Plaisirs d’amour with Zé and Marion. Zé suggested that we play with scale and perspective, which we wouldn’t be able to do during an in-person session. This reminded me of the work of my college professor Natsu Onoda Power, who uses live video feeds of puppets in her plays. These ideas snowballed into a storyline involving fairies played by real people and puppets drawn by Zé, resulting in a toy theater extravaganza which eventually incorporated fire, tomato sauce, and a model volcano.  
 
I was so grateful to be making theater this summer, and I was energized by the many opportunities the virtual format provided. After months of mourning live performance, it felt good to make art with smart and creative people.
 
In the next few months, should things go according to plan (which they don’t tend to do these days) I’ll be directing virtual scenes for Joy Zimmerman’s directing class at Studio Acting Conservatory and directing a virtual performance of A Doll’s House for Silver Spring Stage. If you had asked me before this summer, I would have been highly skeptical of these plans. But I’m happy to conclude that, though many things are bad right now, virtual theater isn’t always one of them.

The Adventures of Cafeteria
Written by me, Zé, and Marion, Puppets drawn by Zé
Starring me, Benoît, Emmy, Eliénore, and Marion
Additional puppetry and camerawork by Sébastien