Interview with Drama on Campus !

On day before the performance of Drama on Campus in the occasion of the Festival des Arts, we had the privilege of meeting Marie Blanquart and Henri Fevre, both leading the association and performing as actors in the “surprise” play.

Interview realised by Tifenn Lecordier and Clarisse Marsac.

We’re now the last day before your performance, how do you feel concerning this very first test for your team?

Marie : It’s complicated! Drama on Campus has been existed for two years, but first as a non-official association. We participated last year at the Minicrit but as we were recognized only last summer as an official association, our participation in the BDA festival makes a big difference.

What about your rehearsals: how often do you rehearse? How do you organize your training sessions?

Marie: We have two groups because we are about forty people, which makes the existence of a single group impossible. We have a Tuesday group and a Wednesday group. Last year there were teachers for the both classes every week, who gave their feedbacks on the way the actors were organized. This year we have only one teacher on Wednesdays, but we’re hoping to have another one on Tuesdays to build a stronger organization.

How many actors do you have?

Marie: Nineteen in the Tuesday group and twelve for the other group.

How did you manage to distribute the roles?

Henri: Following the teacher’s experience and skills, people said what roles they were interested in and then we chose together. Same in Tuesday group, in which we kinda write the play, and then people got together and we allocated what role we found the best for certain people, and by making kind of auditions between them.

What about the composition of your team: do you have exclusively people having already practiced theater before? Are there beginners in the team?

Henri: It’s a bit of a mix actually: there are people who have done theater since the age of eight or nine, and other that are just beginning. It is a bit of a mix of experience.

Marie: It’s pretty nice actually! I’ve been in drama since I am eight, and Chloe only started last year. It allows to gather different experiences, and different perspectives too. For example, I’ve been taught to do things in a particular way and it allows me to confront it to other approaches.

How is it to integrate the team for these beginners? Was it difficult to manage to combine beginners and experienced actors working together on the same scene?

Henri: Actually the difference is not noticed that much: everyone who is part of the group is very willing to get involved and to act. Yes, there are people who have done drama for a long time but everyone is open and willing to get involved.

Why did you chose this particularly play for the Festival des Arts (Shakespeare, The Tempest)?

Henri: The group chose the play actually.

Marie: They were first hesitating with writing a play, but they decided to play extracts because of time restriction: we were aware quite late of the BDA’s festival so we didn’t have much time. We chose this play because it simply fitted the theme, “anywhere out of this world”: the idea of people thrown off to a desert island being completely lost. And the group seems to like it!

How was it to actually write a theater play? How did you organize the team? Wasn’t it a kind of … mess?

Marie: (Laugh) It was… an experience. There was a consensus about what we wanted to do, but we had dozens of different ideas so it took a while to narrow them. We took many different ideas, and we elected a group of four or five people to actually write the play. The Google document was very useful in this way! It was a good creative process.

We assume there must be a leadership role to supervise the writing of the play, how did it go?

Henri: We tried to allocate to the writers what they had to write about. We edited and changed several times: we read together and went to the script line by line, if someone would have a point to change, we would then go and simply change it. Hopefully we came to somewhat organized.

Marie : The difficulty is to try not to get to get off track, too far off topic and to focus on not wasting too much time.

Could you tell us about the setting of the plays? And what type of costumes will you wear?

Henri: The setting itself is very minimalist, since we have a small stage, it’s quite difficult.

Marie: And same for the costumes, they will be very simple ones, the type that are easily on hands in Reims, we’ll focus more on the details to add on to make it look more real and contemporary.

Could you introduce us briefly the theme or the story of the surprise play?

Henri: Well we shouldn’t say too much, it’s supposed to be a surprise after all, but we have based it on a children story.

Marie: It sounds pretty mysterious, you’ll get to see.

Henri: It stages a quite innocent and naive girl put into the situation where’s she’s out of her comfort zone, so it’s about how she reacts to this environment.

What do you expect from the Festival des Arts?

Henri: The people involved are here for the pleasure of acting and since the Festival brings all the arts together we thought we had to take part as the campus theatre group. It’s not that much about getting our association known on campus.

Marie: It’s an opportunity to test how we work on scene, how our group is performing and about putting on something we’ve prepared. It is a good way to see what we’ve done so far. It is also a kind of rehearsal for the Minicrit, which will be our ultimate objective.

Precisely about the Minicrit, have you already thought about the play that you’ll present?

Marie : Definitely, we’ll be performing a play in French, on which we still haven’t decided yet. We’ll first have to select members from the two teams, among those who are the most motivated, the most involved and also there’s the language issue as we need people who are able to perform in French.

Do you have something to say to the students coming on Thursday?

Marie: I’d say come and enjoy yourselves, we hope you’ll like the play.

Henri: Yeah, just come as a relaxing cultural session that’ll distract you from the 3A results that’ll be coming just about the same time (laugh).

Remember that Drama on campus is performing on Thursday at 8pm, for two plays both lasting 20-30 minutes: The Tempest by Shakespeare and a surprise play!

#interview #festivaldesarts