To Mars and back:
New kids’ acting class aims to bring out creativity

Amy Woods
Special to the Sun

Have you ever dreamed that you are waiting for the ancient Amazons to arrive at your birthday party in their invisible airplane and deliver you brownies? Or that you live on Mars, and your best friends, the amoebas from Saturn, are flying in for a sleepover? Or perhaps you’ve imagined that you are the owner of Chinese food restaurant who gets spun back in time, and you must go to Las Vegas to win yourself a fortune to help find your way home.

A new acting class for kids aims to bring those imaginary situations to reality. “Super Silly and Serious Plays” is a new series of children’s acting classes being offered at the Sonoma Ballet Conservatory. Designed for ages 5 through twelve, the classes are being led by long-time director and acting teacher Michelle Pelletier.

Pelletier, who has taught at Altimira Middle School, the Sonoma Community Center, and the Boys and Girls Club, Valley of the Moon, is excited to be back in Sonoma Valley working with its youth.

“The goal of the class is to help young people find their ’voice’— through song, movement and text,” Pelletier said. “I essentially just encourage and bring out what’s there already, within the child.”

Pelletier explained that the class incorporates physical, vocal and movement-based improvisation and exercises throughout the course of the class.
“The students collectively write, produce and perform their own play at the end of the each class session, and it is amazing to watch each child as she shines in her play. The performance gives the child a wonderful sense of accomplishment and self, which they can then take with them into the outside world. My emphasis is always the creative processes of the child’s imagination. We play and dance and sing and generally just have a lot of good fun.”

Typically, the hour-long class includes several different activities. Pelletier greets the class and engages students in exercises that will loosen them up — typically, physical, vocal and improvisational theater games. Then, the class moves on to “Walk and Talk,” a character-development exercise that encourages the students’ creative and imaginative processes and includes “physical flights of fancy.” Each class then spends a majority of its time writing and rehearsing each student’s individual play, which will be performed for family and friends at the end of the class session.

“The creation of the play is the central focus of the class; the children imagine and create their own characters, dialogue and choreography. I simply act as their secretary, recording and writing down the play as they dictate it to me,” said Pelletier. “It is amazing to watch the creative processes of the children — how quickly their minds think, how excited and animated they become when creating their plays. The involvement and enthusiasm for writing and performing something that is truly and uniquely theirs is wonderful and inspirational.”

Michelle Pelletier’s professional credentials include directing at the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in San Francisco, as well as the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. She was the founding director of the Creation Conservatory in Santa Rosa, which won the 2001 North Bay Bohemian newspaper award for “Best place to let your kids express their creative selves.”