When Riverside Theatre’s new education director Jim VanValen left his post as associate professor of theater at Iowa’s Cornell College, he found himself knee-deep in children for the first time in all his years teaching drama.
“Their energy and enthusiasm at 9 a.m. is wonderful,” says VanValen, who oversaw Riverside Children’s Theatre summer camp. “College kids, you’re having to wake them up.”
Now the flood is rising as his students get older – and taller. With luck he’ll be up to his neck by fall when Riverside Theatre launches theater classes for adults, the first such offerings since the 1980s.
Last week, with the campers gone, VanValen began rehearsing the new crop of Riverside acting apprentices, recent college graduates who helped teach summer camp and now are preparing two plays to tour the area’s elementary schools. Soon, they’ll start rehearsing with VanValen for Riverside’s new Theater for Young Audiences program, which this year will stage “The Adventures of Flat Stanley.”
In October, VanValen will be immersed in the first in a series of adult seminars tentatively called Theater Talks. The courses will offer up-close looks at Riverside’s Main Stage productions, from script to staging to post-production critique.
The first will be on the season opener “Ring of Fire,” the Johnny Cash musical. With each subsequent Main Stage production, another will get underway, with as many sections as the sign-up sheet warrants.
The seminars are slated for the Anne Morton stage, a small black box theater with riser seating inside the children’s theater building. And if the sign-ups for a pilot program in adult dance classes are any indication, VanValen may have the grown-ups sitting cross-legged on the floor.
Those dance classes that evolved in conservations with dance director Adam Schnell last spring attracted 47 people, more than twice what Schnell was expecting. They ranged in age from 20-somethings to a few in their 70s, says Schnell. Almost all have signed up for fall classes. “It’s insane,” says Schnell. “We have men in their 60s taking ballet.” The fall classes are being expanded to include jazz and possibly tap. They are offered morning and evening to accommodate those who work.
Assuming VanValen’s Theater Talks are a success, the next offering will be adult acting classes, from monologues to scene work to improvisation.
VanValen believes the more people know about the plays, the more engaged they will be in the theater. “If we can remind folks of how much the theater experience is about audience and performers sharing the same space, it becomes a more active and exciting experience and not a passive one. If these classes help, that’s wonderful.”
“The idea is to tap into lifelong learning,” he says. “And there’s no shelf life for that.”
VanValen urges anyone interested in such courses to get in touch with the theater now, while ideas are being developed. “If there is interest in these opportunities, it’s our job to provide them. That goes for all ages, and special needs. There’s a lot of programming we’re looking to develop across the board.”
Scholarships currently available to younger students may also be available for adults, VanValen says. He expects a schedule to be posted soon on the Riverside website.
VanValen, who starred in the one-man show “Underneath the Lintel” a year-and-a-half ago in Riverside’s Second Stage series, replaced Riverside Children’s Theatre’s Linda Downey, who retired last year. Another newcomer, Jo Pearl, is helping with administration of Riverside Children’s Theatre.
VanValen has moved here with his wife Brenda, an actress whom he met in a Riverside production years ago, and their 7-year-old daughter Maysie.
As a parent, he envisions an added plus to the new adult classes.
“Wouldn’t it be exciting for parents and their kids to have experiences here at the same time?”
