Friday morning in the auditorium at Lincoln High School was positively myth-busting.
Zeus and the rest of the 12 Olympians, the deity dozen, like you’ve never imagined them, in top hats and fedoras; on skateboards; doing slapstick and standup.
What was up?
It was showcase time, the culmination of an annual weeklong summer camp called Creative Summer Intensives, a DMPS Gifted & Talented production.
Last month we reported on a GT summer program for elementary students. This week it was the next level’s turn.
Seventy-four 7-9 graders spent the week diving into declared “majors” and “minors” in creative disciplines that included theater, dance, visual art, writing and debate/speech.
“It was a strong turnout,” according to camp director Karen Sissel, one of the district’s GT consultants who’s in her 5th year at the helm. “We are very excited to share some of the work and learning that happened this week.”
Participants who needed them rode shuttle buses between their respective middle schools and the campground at Lincoln each day and accomplished more in five mornings than would seem possible, even if their sessions had been daylong.
An impromptu gallery along the back wall of the auditorium displayed non-performative work samples like calligraphy and debate notes, but the setting was right in the wheelhouse for the thespian types, who staged a condensed version of the play The Iliad, The Odyssey, and All of Greek Mythology in 99 minutes or Less.
A nutshell production of a nutshell production, in other words, one that aimed for laughs and got plenty of them right on cues. Besides the classic Greek mythology skewered by the sketch, maybe the myth that bright kids are bookish and humorless was punctured too, if it hasn’t been already.
Dancers, too, got to strut their stuff, and did, across a range from the 16th century to contemporary.
It was poetry in motion to go along with the written form, plenty of which was also produced by the campers, who themselves are as much works in progress as what they were up to at a summer camp that played to their creative faves.
