Slow motions

The sharp noise of a caterwauling 6-year-old actress echoes off the walls of the 1078 gallery as the assembled audience of theater campers laugh along with her feline actions. She jumps down from a foldable chair and begins gracefully crawling along the floor, mewing, as another actress steps back with an incredulous gaze, hands covering her mouth. As the scene progresses, the second girl is coaxed to the floor and into her own cat impression. Another roar of laughter fills the room.

And scene. Bows. Applause.

The 10 children scatter for a quick break before the movement portion of camp begins.

This is a snapshot of one of the June session classes during Chico’s Slow Theatre youth summer camp, created to give young actors and actresses a place to freely to express themselves through acting and movement. The camps run two weeks for each session and conclude with a showcase (the next camp starts July 21).

Amanda Detmer, Chico State theater arts graduate and professional actress known for her roles in films including Final Destination, Saving Silverman, Big Fat Liar as well as numerous stage and television credits, is the instructor of the camp’s acting and voice lessons. She said the theater is not shooting for some end product that pressures kids to perform. Instead, it emphasizes a slower, more realistic process.

“We’re giving the children a voice, allowing them to express the things that matter to them, and then, hopefully, in the future, turning that into a performance,” she said. “They’re here for themselves more than anything and I think that’s really important for growing actors. And I think we need that in Chico.”

Slow Theatre was started in 2013 by founding members Denver Latimer (who was also a founding member of downtown Chico’s Blue Room Theatre), 1078 Gallery board member Thomasin Saxe and Chico State English professor Rob Davidson and Humanities instructor Laura Nice.

Latimer said the theater’s ultimate goal is to build a local professional theater committed to actor-training for the entire community. The theater is in its infancy right now and this is its first summer youth camp, but the idea is to have year-round children’s camps playing a key role in the theater’s endeavors.

While Detmer teaches improvisational games, diction and vocal exercises, and scene work, Naphtali Jones, a Chico hip-hop dance instructor, teaches the movement section. This includes rhythm and timing games and instruction in dance styles such as West African, hip-hop, salsa and interpretive.

After just two weeks of instruction and participation, the 10 children in the June camp seemed to not only be loving the process, but growing through it. Madison Kisst, theater intern and camp assistant, said the young actors were speaking more clearly, concisely and assertively than when they started.

“It’s pretty incredible how some of the quietest ones are now the most engaged in what we’re doing and more vocal about what they think about what we’re doing,” she said.

One of the camp’s actors, 11-year-old Luciano Castaldo, said he’s learned a lot and been inspired by the instructors. He likes that everybody gets a turn to be all the characters in skits and feel involved.

“With other theater companies, it’s more, ‘You get a part, that’s it.’ If you’re a lead role or a small role, then you don’t get to do that much,” he said. “But here, you get to be really any part you want.”

Jones said she feels honored to work with Slow Theatre to provide a safe environment where children can express themselves through theater and creative movement.

“I’m trying to introduce these children to the imagination and the creative standpoint of movement,” she said. “I want them to be able to go out and express themselves because they’re feeling it.”

Latimer said the idea of a “slow theater” process came from his time as a graduate school intern at the New York Theatre Workshop. In this style of theater, stories and issues are sourced from a specified region and the play-making process is deliberate in order to increase emotional truth on stage. It involves workshopping and multiple readings before full rehearsal even begins.

“We wanted to spend more time with the scripts and try to figure out if the scripts actually had any resonance within the community before we ever committed to rehearsing them,” Latimer said. “That kind of lent itself to a slower development of the process.”

“The idea is for this program to grow in size,” Detmer added, “so that at some point we may begin to explore performances and that they will pertain to issues that the children face and issues that the town faces.”