Rehearsing for the Sterling Renaissance Festival is like preparing a massive sandbox that guests will gladly step in.
Jill Connor / The CitizenJosie Bitetta, of Fort Lee, N. J., plays Flauminia, the lover, with Frank Cardillo, of Long Island, left, and Gabe Barry, of Syracuse, center. All are rehearsing as servants in a comedy play at the Renaissance Festival in Sterling. The festival - with many more shows that last year's - kicks off later next month.
As a 35-acre set piece of interactive theater, the festival hosts endless dramatic possibilities once its cast of beggars, gypsies, swordsmen and other characters of yore collide personalities with patrons.
Preparing to make those encounters enjoyable for guests is the focus of five weeks of 10-hour rehearsals six days a week. For 30 years, Artistic Director Gary Izzo has steered the festival's Bless the Mark Players through the creation of the characters in which they will walk the Sterling grounds all summer.
“It's pretty daunting,” he said. “They're improvising with a new group and learning character development and performing techniques alien to them, plus a new dialect and language, then putting it all together in extemporaneous form. You need extraordinary people for this.”
Actress Josie Bitetta will make her festival debut this year as a gypsy. Bitetta, a Stony Brook University graduate, was among about 2,000 people Izzo auditioned across the East Coast for 15 to 20 open roles. Landing one of those select spots demands the performer to demonstrate talents for improvisation, collaboration and comedy.
“I look for someone who's there in the room with you, they're not on the stage in the distance,” Izzo said. “That's the difference between an actor and a performer. A performer engages you.”
Once picked to populate Sterling's world of antiquity, Renaissance Festival performers like Bitetta are given character types to bring to life based on their physical characteristics and personalities.This creative process is left largely to the performer.
“We're creating characters from scratch; we do research and study how our particular type of person would be in their time period,” Bitetta said. “With a script you go backwards; they give you the character and you deduce what they're like.”
In addition to improvisation and character workshops, the festival's cast spends its rehearsal time preparing for the summer with vocal and physical training to assert their presence over Sterling's sprawling dirt floor stage. Dialect instruction is designed to seal the illusion with convincing Elizabethan England-era speech, most popularly marked by “thees” and “thous.”
This year, 19-season festival veteran Charles F. Murray will portray Rando, a former mate on Sir Francis Drake's ship who sets sail on his own for the first time. For Murray, the physical and vocal aspects of performance are the most immersive.
“I'll be saying 'mayhaps' and 'perchance' clear into September,” he said. “It's like a foreign language.”
The characters Murray and Bitetta create do not exist in a vacuum. They are fleshed out only through their improvised interactions with festival guests. In their intense rehearsal time, Renaissance performers are instructed to allow those guests to guide the interactions. Izzo feels that forcing a certain conclusion is not a goal of great interactive theater.
“It's supportive improvisation, not like what you see on TV,” he said. “It's not 'be funny at all costs,' it's about showing human foibles in absurd situations.”
Similar festivals that see performers chase and grab patrons to drag them into the drama are taking the wrong approach, Izzo said. For him, providing guests with the choice of participating is crucial. Renaissance Festival characters will telegraph themselves to invite the patron to overcome their inhibitions and interact with them.
“The key is to move someone from one place to another without making them feel self-conscious,” Izzo said. “The performer says, 'Here's my sandbox, want to play?'”
Murray interprets his and fellow performers' purpose as reminding patrons of the childhood thrill of play time. While this often entails some encouragement by the cast, there are occasions when the audience doesn't need it.
“The best thing is when you can get an audience member to take over, that's just magic,” Murray said.
To offer their audience something to work with, performers develop “endowment characters” for whom they may mistake a patron. One of Bitetta's endowment characters wears a large ring on the third finger of her right hand. Should she detect a festival-goer fitting this description, Bitetta will approach them and the two can play off a ready-made situation of sorts.
In the rare instance that a patron approaches an interaction with a bad attitude, the actor uses this energy to spur the situation along. Izzo refers to this tactic as the “Yes and...” technique, which teaches actors to agree with the surly spectator and add upon it.
“If the player resists it and shuts the person up, it'll inspire something ruder,” he said. “By virtue of what you add, you change it and suddenly they're playing with you.”
In an instance of turning such negativity into “play,” Murray recalls a group of teenagers harassing the Lord Mayor performer's fictional daughter character. The man hounded the young patrons into participating in festival games until they finally apologized for their remarks.
This year's festival finds the cast performing in one of its busiest settings yet. Under the new ownership of Douglas Waterbury, principle owner of Ontario Realty, Inc., the Sterling summer event has restored its condensed Shakespeare performances and expanded the number of shows from 60 to more than 140.
The 2008 festival will feature new acts like drum and pipe bands, aerial artists and living statues. A new rating system will steer parents and their children away from slightly more mature acts like Zilch the Tory Steller - and his bawdy spoonerisms - and toward events like the children's swordfighting show, which infuses the traditional spectacle with a moral of mercy.
But once again providing the living, breathing core of the Renaissance Festival is the Bless the Mark Players, who look forward to welcoming another summer's worth of scene partners to Sterling.
“It's all about taking yourself back to 'let's pretend,'” Murray said. “We're all kids making sand castles.”
Staff writer David Wilcox can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 245 or david.wilcox@lee.net
Preparing to make those encounters enjoyable for guests is the focus of five weeks of 10-hour rehearsals six days a week. For 30 years, Artistic Director Gary Izzo has steered the festival's Bless the Mark Players through the creation of the characters in which they will walk the Sterling grounds all summer.
“It's pretty daunting,” he said. “They're improvising with a new group and learning character development and performing techniques alien to them, plus a new dialect and language, then putting it all together in extemporaneous form. You need extraordinary people for this.”
Actress Josie Bitetta will make her festival debut this year as a gypsy. Bitetta, a Stony Brook University graduate, was among about 2,000 people Izzo auditioned across the East Coast for 15 to 20 open roles. Landing one of those select spots demands the performer to demonstrate talents for improvisation, collaboration and comedy.
“I look for someone who's there in the room with you, they're not on the stage in the distance,” Izzo said. “That's the difference between an actor and a performer. A performer engages you.”
Once picked to populate Sterling's world of antiquity, Renaissance Festival performers like Bitetta are given character types to bring to life based on their physical characteristics and personalities.This creative process is left largely to the performer.
“We're creating characters from scratch; we do research and study how our particular type of person would be in their time period,” Bitetta said. “With a script you go backwards; they give you the character and you deduce what they're like.”
In addition to improvisation and character workshops, the festival's cast spends its rehearsal time preparing for the summer with vocal and physical training to assert their presence over Sterling's sprawling dirt floor stage. Dialect instruction is designed to seal the illusion with convincing Elizabethan England-era speech, most popularly marked by “thees” and “thous.”
This year, 19-season festival veteran Charles F. Murray will portray Rando, a former mate on Sir Francis Drake's ship who sets sail on his own for the first time. For Murray, the physical and vocal aspects of performance are the most immersive.
“I'll be saying 'mayhaps' and 'perchance' clear into September,” he said. “It's like a foreign language.”
The characters Murray and Bitetta create do not exist in a vacuum. They are fleshed out only through their improvised interactions with festival guests. In their intense rehearsal time, Renaissance performers are instructed to allow those guests to guide the interactions. Izzo feels that forcing a certain conclusion is not a goal of great interactive theater.
“It's supportive improvisation, not like what you see on TV,” he said. “It's not 'be funny at all costs,' it's about showing human foibles in absurd situations.”
Similar festivals that see performers chase and grab patrons to drag them into the drama are taking the wrong approach, Izzo said. For him, providing guests with the choice of participating is crucial. Renaissance Festival characters will telegraph themselves to invite the patron to overcome their inhibitions and interact with them.
“The key is to move someone from one place to another without making them feel self-conscious,” Izzo said. “The performer says, 'Here's my sandbox, want to play?'”
Murray interprets his and fellow performers' purpose as reminding patrons of the childhood thrill of play time. While this often entails some encouragement by the cast, there are occasions when the audience doesn't need it.
“The best thing is when you can get an audience member to take over, that's just magic,” Murray said.
To offer their audience something to work with, performers develop “endowment characters” for whom they may mistake a patron. One of Bitetta's endowment characters wears a large ring on the third finger of her right hand. Should she detect a festival-goer fitting this description, Bitetta will approach them and the two can play off a ready-made situation of sorts.
In the rare instance that a patron approaches an interaction with a bad attitude, the actor uses this energy to spur the situation along. Izzo refers to this tactic as the “Yes and...” technique, which teaches actors to agree with the surly spectator and add upon it.
“If the player resists it and shuts the person up, it'll inspire something ruder,” he said. “By virtue of what you add, you change it and suddenly they're playing with you.”
In an instance of turning such negativity into “play,” Murray recalls a group of teenagers harassing the Lord Mayor performer's fictional daughter character. The man hounded the young patrons into participating in festival games until they finally apologized for their remarks.
This year's festival finds the cast performing in one of its busiest settings yet. Under the new ownership of Douglas Waterbury, principle owner of Ontario Realty, Inc., the Sterling summer event has restored its condensed Shakespeare performances and expanded the number of shows from 60 to more than 140.
The 2008 festival will feature new acts like drum and pipe bands, aerial artists and living statues. A new rating system will steer parents and their children away from slightly more mature acts like Zilch the Tory Steller - and his bawdy spoonerisms - and toward events like the children's swordfighting show, which infuses the traditional spectacle with a moral of mercy.
But once again providing the living, breathing core of the Renaissance Festival is the Bless the Mark Players, who look forward to welcoming another summer's worth of scene partners to Sterling.
“It's all about taking yourself back to 'let's pretend,'” Murray said. “We're all kids making sand castles.”
Staff writer David Wilcox can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 245 or david.wilcox@lee.net
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