Dear Aidan Community,

Thank you to all of you who came out to support the Elementary students in our recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I thought that ALL of the kids performed the best I had ever seen them perform it. They really love an audience. I had so much fun directing this show and it has been wonderful to see the children getting hooked on Shakespeare. On Monday morning I saw Elementary students researching about Shakespeare in the library, and the UE students are already putting on their own production of Romeo and Juliet and have already printed out scripts. At lunch today, I was pleased to hear Primary children quoting the lines of Shakespeare from our play.

There are many skills and lessons learned with a hands-on project like putting on a play. One of our recent drama lessons was in the form of a game I made up called, "Your mistake is our little secret." I designed this game, many years ago, after watching another school production of Elementary-aged children on stage continuously make the mistake of pointing out their peer's mistakes in front of the audience. I realized that the acting technique of "covering for" someone else or for yourself is a learned behavior and an awareness needs to be brought to the attention of the students in order for them to truly cover for one another on stage. The Elementary-aged child loves secrets so I thought that I should point out that covering other people's mistakes is a form of keeping their secret.

I often talk to the students about teamwork and how good theatre is the result of genuine teamwork. In our "game," (and I call it a game though it is really more of a workshop) the students work in pairs with a page of the script. I try to choose sections of the script where I think that they might have trouble with their lines. I ask them to first act out the page with their partner the "wrong way" for the class - which means that one of them will purposefully make a mistake and then the other one needs to openly point out the mistake somehow. The children find this to be hilarious. The students love making mistakes and pointing them out - usually very dramatically to the class. It's a fun way to bring awareness to certain behaviors that I would like the children to avoid. Then I have them redo the scene with the same intentional mistake but the second time, they have to truly cover for the other one. I am proud to say that on Friday night the children covered for each other on stage beautifully, while staying in character. These are great life lessons in performing with poise and grace and for building teamwork.

I enjoyed having our Lower Elementary student fairies on stage holding tree branches. They are adorable no matter what they do and I had read an article about a Julie Taymor production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which she cast many children to play the fairies and had them run around the stage throughout the entire production. Her vision was that the fairies are always in the forest and that they should be present in all scenes in the woods. This really inspired me to allow our young spirits to have more stage time, even if it just meant sitting there holding a tree. It felt like an organic way to have very young students experience being on stage. The students told me on Monday that they preferred being on stage holding a tree branch because they got to see the acting up close!

For those of you who missed A Midsummer Night's Dream, we will be sending parents an edited, password-protected video in about three weeks.

Until then, please check out Aidan's Facebook page to enjoy pictures from our show.

Thank you again for all of your support!

Eva Esparza