Rising stars
Theater camp inspires youth to dance, act out dreams
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ARLEE – Coral Sherman walks from her seat in the stands at the Arlee powwow grounds and sits in the middle of the stage. She begins to hit the plywood stage with her hands to create a rhythm for her to sing a song in Salish. As a gust of wind pushes through the grounds, kicking up dust, Sherman’s strong voice fills the structure that usually houses stick games during the annual Arlee Celebration powwow. Her voice cues children sitting in different locations in the stands to join her on stage.
Watching from the side is instructor Myrton Running Wolf who is a writer, actor, producer and director. Running Wolf has degrees from the University of California Film/Television School and New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and Performance. He currently is a first-year PhD student at Stanford University.
“Okay, that was good,” Running Wolf tells his students. “Now do it again.”
One by one they leave the stage as they have done several times before and return to their places.
Standing near Running Wolf is choreographer and dancer Kathy Wildberger, a senior lecturer at Vassar College in New York. The two have been working with a group of about 10 students from the community to teach them about theater, dance, acting, history and themselves for the next two weeks.
Running Wolf said one of the first things he had the children do was introduce themselves. He asked them to stand up and tell them their name and who they represent whether that includes tribal or family affiliations. Running Wolf explained the activity as a way to teach his students how to reflect on who they are and how to express themselves.
“We want them to generate their own stories,” Running Wolf said. “We are not telling them what to do. We are giving them the tools to speak their own stories.”
One the first day of theater camp, students were introduced to slow motion state combat, which is acting out a fight scene but in slow motion.
During a lunch break on the second day, Shaylin Couture, Patty Christensen and Indigo Sherman practice their slow motion fight scenes in the gym of the Arlee Community Center. Their bodies silhouetted in the glow of the afternoon sun as light streamed in from the high gym windows. The students inched across the floor.
Running Wolf said sometimes slow motion stage combat scenes called “buttoh” that can often take up to five hours to move 30 feet.
“Now, of course, for these kids, slow motion means about 10 seconds,” he said with a laugh.
Raised mostly in northern Nevada, Running Wolf is a member of the Blackfeet tribe and spent many summers in Browning. He originally went to school to pursue a degree in mathematics and chemistry at the University of Nevada, Reno, but each semester he always took a theater class. Now he has acted in movies such as Skins, New World and the Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Running Wolf and Wildberger said they are used to teaching college and high school students, but are excited to introduce theater to the youth.
“I still can’t believe you met Lucy Lawless,” Coral told Running Wolf during a break. Lawless is best known for her role as Xena in the television series Xena: Warrior Princess.
“He (Running Wolf) is really inspiring,” 13-year-old Coral said. “When I was little I wanted to be in movies. I just watched the movie Skins that he was in the day before I met him.”
After lunch, Wildberger led the group in creating a dance. She first asked them to describe boarding schools with one word. The students yelled out words and created a dance that mimicked an assembly line of boarding students made to fold blankets.
They yelled out one after another, while keeping a beat folding imaginary blankets, they said, “torture, strict, boring, cruel, English, sad and no hair.”
“I felt sick to my stomach,” Coral said. “Because I was being forced to do something I didn’t want to do like the kids in the boarding schools. But what I had to do was not as bad. They had it worse.”
Alexia Greene, 11, said she enjoyed the boarding school inspired dance because it was an opportunity to “learn instead of reading about it in a book.”
Her favorite activity from the first few days of camp was learning about the slow motion fight scenes.
“I like to dance,” Greene said. “My family says I’m a drama queen. It would be cool to learn how to act.”
This week, instructor Sean Curran, who performed in the Broadway show Stomp, will join students. The camp will conclude with a final public performance on Friday, July 29 at the Arlee powwow grounds.
