At Friday night’s Senior Showcase, 17 seniors became graduates of the Harker Conservatory’s certificate program, each having spent four years studying one of the conservatory’s six disciplines: vocal music, instrumental music, dance, theater, musical theater and technical theater. The evening also included performances from the graduates and the presentation of the Life in the Arts award to Steve Boyle ’06.
The slide show included in this story features each of this year’s Conservatory graduates, in the order they are listed below:
Last month, Amelia Huchley ’19 was featured in a story by The Student Life, the newspaper of the Claremont Colleges, which covered her recent win in the Claremont Concert Orchestra’s Concerto Competition. She is the first vocalist in more than a decade to win.
Huchley, who graduated from the Harker Conservatory with a musical theater certificate and now attends Scripps College, told The Student Life about pursuing a career in music and the difficulty of making a living as a professional singer.
“At a lot of turns, I do get a lot of people saying to me, ‘You know how hard it is to make this work, right?’ And I do,” she said. “But on the other hand, I feel like I’m learning, and I’m making progress with my voice, and obviously some people do become professional opera singers. It’s not like it’s never going to happen. … I know it’s going to be really difficult. I do feel like I owe it to myself to try it and see if I can do it.”
She also discussed her love of singing and why she finds performing live so fulfilling.
“Even if you get up and do the exact same performance the next day, even if the performance that you did was recorded, it’s never going to happen exactly that way again, and that is really freeing.”
See the full story for more of Huchley’s thoughts on music and performance.
The Harker Conservatory held its inaugural Summer Conservatory program in June and July, inviting young theater enthusiasts to grasp a unique opportunity to hone their craft and learn from top instructors and industry professionals.
Laura Lang-Ree, Harker’s director of performing arts, had been exploring the idea of a summer program at Harker, as she knew firsthand the value of strong summer performing arts programs, both as a professional and a mother to three performing arts-loving kids.
“But I also knew that there was nowhere to host it. … With nowhere to host such a program, it was only a dream – until this year,” said Lang-Ree, alluding to the opening of the Rothschild Performing Arts Center. As the opening of the new building approached, she began looking into how to develop a summer program while addressing another challenge: how to create a program that would not directly compete with other summer performing arts offerings outside Harker that she felt were “already doing a wonderful job.”
“There was a lot around that was really great, and there is no reason to compete with programs that are already doing a great service in the community,” she said. To this end, Lang-Ree began searching last summer for a specific niche that the future program would fill to enhance the selection of summer offerings without competing with them.
It was around this time that Lang-Ree discovered that one of her favorite theater companies, the California Theatre Center, would be closing its doors after more than 40 years. Lang-Ree, who found the news “devastating,” stepped up to help fill the void left by CTC’s closure. Her own children – rising senior Ellie, Cecilia ’13 and Madi ’15, who was on staff at Summer Conservatory – had enjoyed great experiences at programs such as CTC and Peninsula Youth Theatre. “Our summers were full of fantastic theater opportunities,” she said. “Losing CTC was a loss to the entire community.”
With the information she had gathered from consulting people from other summer programs, Lang-Ree designed the Summer Conservatory to be “a process-based, in-depth, thoughtful program for kids who are really hungry to learn more, do more and be more as a theater artist student.”
Students in grades 6-9 joined the Conservatory Presents course, designed for young theater lovers eager to build their chops. A more advanced course, called Conservatory Intensive, was available for grade 9-12 students by audition only. Morning classes – both required and elective – emphasized voice and movement, scene study, improvisation and other techniques.
“One of the interesting things about being a performer is you go deeper as you repeat lessons already learned,” Lang-Ree explained. “There’s a certain level of repetition that’s very important to becoming a more finessed performer, and yet we’ll always have something a little bit more to hand the older child so that they’re getting more to chew on as they grow.”
Students spent the afternoons rehearsing for one-act plays that were performed on the final day of the program. Performers were cast following auditions held at the beginning of the course.
Among the directing staff, 2015 Harker Conservatory graduates Zoe Woehrmann and Madi Lang-Ree were brought on as co-directors for the showcase, and helped develop and teach acting classes in addition to their directorial duties.
“We’ve been a part of the performing arts program at Harker for our entire lives, and it’s what inspired us to pursue theater in college as well,” Woehrmann said. “When we heard of the opportunity to be able to help be part of the inaugural group of teachers and directors to start the summer program at Harker … we just jumped at the opportunity.”
Because of their extensive conservatory experience (both were directors featured in the 2015 Student Directed Showcase), she and Madi were given considerable freedom when helping to create the Summer Conservatory curriculum along with Lang-Ree. Both alumnae also are studying theater in college, with Madi having directed a one-act play in her most recent semester at Chapman University, and Woehrmann, a rising senior at New York University, planning to take a play she wrote and directed to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
“We worked together before camp actually started to design the curriculum and the daily schedule of classes we thought were important and how we were going to structure them and what we were going to teach within them,” Woerhmann said. They then worked in conjunction with Lang-Ree to come up with the best possible age-appropriate class curriculum for serious theater students.
Madi, who has previous experience teaching at other summer programs, said she was surprised by how much students already knew and their enthusiasm for the many aspects of the program. “I don’t remember knowing very much at all about Shakespeare in middle school, but I’ve had a couple kids who are like, ‘I’ve got this monologue memorized from Hamlet and this one from Macbeth!’” she exclaimed. “And then some kids will really like movement or really like improvisation and some kids will keep asking us, ‘Can I help with costumes or can I help with tech elements as well as being on stage.’”
Students with that eagerness to delve deeply into theater are precisely the type Laura Lang-Ree hopes the program will continue to attract. “[Summer Conservatory] is for the kid who believes what’s fun is the day-to-day work, the rehearsals where they can go deeper and bring out all the details of their characters and the story they are telling” she said. “That’s what they will achieve here.”
The Senior Showcase on May 12 featured the 2017 graduates of the Harker Conservatory’s certificate program performing in various disciplines, including dance, musical theater, and vocal and instrumental music. The 34 students who presented that evening had spent the previous four years in intensive study of one of the seven disciplines offered by the conservatory. At the conclusion of the performances, the students received their certificates to signify their completion of the program, and showed their appreciation for the teachers who provided crucial guidance over the previous four years.
This Harker Conservatory graduates honored this year were:
Dance: Tamlyn Doll, Hazal Gurcan, Surabhi Rao, David Zhu
Instrumental Music: Cuebeom Choi, Maile Chung, Jack Farnham, May Gao, Alexa Gross, Aashish Jain, Soham Khan, Lauren Liu, Edward Oh, Judy Pan, Shekar Ramaswamy, Andrew Rule, Vedaad Shakib, Melinda Wisdom, Alex Youn
This article originally appeared in the winter 2013 Harker Quarterly.
Graduates of The Harker Conservatory’s certificate program have spread out across the United States to pursue the arts. 2013 alumni are dancing, singing, playing music and making theater at top universities. For some, that means indulging in their art as an extracurricular activity as they pursue academic disciplines. For others, it means a major or a minor as they make art a part of their college studies. A select few are building on their solid foundation from The Harker Conservatory as they train to pursue their work professionally. Here are the stories of three such alumnae, who headed off to the East Coast to pursue their dreams of acting.
Cristina Jerney headed to Northeastern University in Boston for intimate theater training and an interdisciplinary curriculum. “Northeastern’s lots of fun,” Jerney says. “[The program’s] small, but it’s growing.” The program’s small size means the teachers can work very closely with their students, offering “a lot of individual attention.”
This semester, Jerney acted in Calderón de la Barca’s “The Phantom Lady.” She played a variety of ensemble roles in the 1629 Spanish piece, which featured heavy doses of romance and sword-fighting. In classes, the actors work to release themselves from attitudes of judgment, engaging in exercises that test their ability to commit and to withstand stress. Her curriculum is all theater classes with the exception of a writing class. In her next semester, Jerney will begin to incorporate her multidisciplinary interests, branching out into film and media. She calls Northeastern a “great opportunity to study what I love.”
When a friend from Harker visited her, the two discussed just how well Harker had prepared them. Jerney recalls traveling to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where the Harker Conservatory instituted a rule that if students were even a minute late for their call, they would not be allowed to perform in the show that night. That level of discipline instilled a professionalism in Jerney that has served her well at Northeastern, where she has been able to build on skills from Harker in an environment where all of the students around her are pursuing arts for their education. “I like understanding people, and I like understanding what they do and why they do it,” she says. That sentiment is the basis for her love of performing, and why she wants to be a professional actress.
Apurva Tandon is at Williams College in Massachusetts, and so far, she has been bowled over. “Oh, my gosh, they have everything,” she raves. “It’s so professional, it’s crazy. They have a scene shop. They have a costume shop. They have people working there all the time. There are three different theaters in one building. And they’re beautiful. To someone who does theater, it’s a goldmine.”
Tandon has been expanding her horizons and taking on exciting and inventive projects. A highlight of her first semester has been a production she acted in of “Fefu and Her Friends,” an experimental play by Maria Irene Fornés that takes place in multiple rooms of a house, all at once, with the audience divided into groups and watching different scenes in different locations. Tandon’s production took place in a real house on Williams’ campus, making for a wholly intimate performance. “I had a scene where I was sitting on a couch in a living room, and the audience was literally told to sit on the couch next to me and my scene partner.” The experience was a revelation for Tandon, one that taught her more about feminism and gave her the most modern show she had ever been in. “They’re so open to trying new things” at Williams. “It’s very, very open. Very experimental.”
Tandon credits Harker for having prepared her extraordinarily well for her theater classes. At the moment, her theater course load builds on the Study of Theater class she took with Jeffrey Draper. “I remember all of this from my freshman year at Harker!” she sometimes finds herself thinking.
For Tandon, the university experience has been all about getting involved. “I’ve literally tried out for everything,” she boasts. “If you’re not afraid to try out for everything and put yourself out there, something will come to you. Honestly, I just want to be involved with everything I can.” So far, that’s meant working with both the department and a studentrun group. She even performed an improv show in a storefront window on one of Williamstown’s main streets. Says Tandon, “I’m definitely getting to know the wonders of sitespecific work!”
You can find Hannah Prutton ’13 on Broadway these days – that’s 890 Broadway, at the tip of Union Square in New York City, where she trains with The Meisner Extension at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. It’s an intensive program devoted to the teachings of acting guru Sanford Meisner, who divined a series of exercises and philosophies to aid actors in living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. “It’s very stressful,” says Prutton, “but really rewarding.”
Classes begin for Prutton in the early morning with two hours of Suzuki training, where a teacher she calls an “absolute genius” leads the actors in a physical theater technique inspired by Greek theater and martial arts. The technique, which takes an enormous amount of energy and features copious amounts of stomping, is designed to increase an actor’s natural awareness of his or her body. From there, she is off to voice and speech class, where the young lady with British parents hopes to finally “learn a proper American accent!” That brings her to three hours of acting training, where the students engage in a series of repetition-based exercises. These “allow our scene partner to influence our emotions, and to have that result in truth on the stage,” says Prutton. Because people develop “habits to avoid being hurt or being honest with other people,” the actors use the practices to lean into being truthful with partners and let go of the barriers to honest emotion. “When you actually get to the moment where you really, truly feel what they’re saying to you, it’s horrible,” says Prutton of the painful breakthroughs the technique inspires. “But amazing afterwards.”
Freshmen actors at New York University are forbidden from doing plays in their first year to prevent them from falling back on old habits. In this way, the students are given a full year to immerse themselves in their new training, letting go of how they used to act in high school and rebuilding their processes in the image of their professional training. According to Prutton, the actors leave behind “older habits that we’ve accumulated over the years” in favor of finding their “most truthful selves.” Her second year, she will begin character work in her studio and begin testing out what she has learned in productions.
For Prutton, “Harker is the reason I’m so passionate about theater.” Her sophomore year, Prutton traveled to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with the Harker Conservatory to perform the musical “Pippin.” Now, she can leave her studio after a full day of classes, walk across the street to board the subway, and hop uptown to Times Square to catch “Pippin” on Broadway. Overall, she is learning a lot in her freshman year. “The technique that we’re learning is very compatible with my style as an actor,” she says. “I really love it.”
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Amid the festivities leading up to graduation, seniors active in the performing arts have a pregraduation of sorts: they graduate from the Harker Conservatory’s certificate program, signaling their successful completion of a fouryear course in dance, technical theater, theater, vocal or instrumental music, or musical theater.
Seniors performed selections from their portfolios to a packed house at the Mexican Heritage Plaza Theater in San Jose.
Acts ranged from a Shakespearean monologue, divided into two parts performed toward the beginning and end of the show, to a clarinet sonata during which the instrument was slowly dismantled section by section, leaving the player with only a mouthpiece. Dance graduates performed and musical theater students enacted moments from Broadway shows. Vocalists, a harpist playing a traditional Chinese instrument, and classical and jazz instrumentalists rounded out the eclectic evening, overseen by a technical theater graduate.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Neon, stone-washed denim and gallons of hairspray made a temporary comeback during the Harker Conservatory’s spring musical, “The Wedding Singer,” which played at the Blackford Theater in late April.
Mid-‘80s New Jersey was the setting for this lovable romantic comedy, directed by Laura Lang-Ree. Happy-go-lucky wedding singer Robbie (Ian Richardson, grade 12) goes from ecstatic to crestfallen when his longtime girlfriend Linda (Caroline Howells, grade 11) unceremoniously dumps him at the altar with a note. The resulting comedy drew plenty of laughs, as well as “oohs” and “ahhs” for the Katie O’Bryon choreographed musical sequences, not to mention “awws” for its heartfelt emotional center.
Set against the ostentatious backdrop of the 1980s, “The Wedding Singer” employed many nods to the culture of the decade. The musical’s score, fittingly filled with touches of synth pop and new wave, was wonderfully played by The Wedding Singer band, directed by Catherine Snider.
As with every major performing arts production, the student crew proved invaluable.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Neon, stone-washed denim and gallons of hairspray made a temporary comeback during the Harker Conservatory’s spring musical, “The Wedding Singer,” which played at the Blackford Theater in late April.
Mid-‘80s New Jersey was the setting for this lovable romantic comedy, directed by Laura Lang-Ree. Happy-go-lucky wedding singer Robbie (Ian Richardson, grade 12) goes from ecstatic to crestfallen when his longtime girlfriend Linda (Caroline Howells, grade 11) unceremoniously dumps him at the altar with a note. The resulting comedy drew plenty of laughs, as well as “oohs” and “ahhs” for the Katie O’Bryon choreographed musical sequences, not to mention “awws” for its heartfelt emotional center.
Set against the ostentatious backdrop of the 1980s, “The Wedding Singer” employed many nods to the culture of the decade. The musical’s score, fittingly filled with touches of synth pop and new wave, was wonderfully played by The Wedding Singer band, directed by Catherine Snider.
As with every major performing arts production, the student crew proved invaluable.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Neon, stone-washed denim and gallons of hairspray made a temporary comeback during the Harker Conservatory’s spring musical, “The Wedding Singer,” which played at the Blackford Theater in late April.
Mid-‘80s New Jersey was the setting for this lovable romantic comedy, directed by Laura Lang-Ree. Happy-go-lucky wedding singer Robbie (Ian Richardson, grade 12) goes from ecstatic to crestfallen when his longtime girlfriend Linda (Caroline Howells, grade 11) unceremoniously dumps him at the altar with a note. The resulting comedy drew plenty of laughs, as well as “oohs” and “ahhs” for the Katie O’Bryon choreographed musical sequences, not to mention “awws” for its heartfelt emotional center.
Set against the ostentatious backdrop of the 1980s, “The Wedding Singer” employed many nods to the culture of the decade. The musical’s score, fittingly filled with touches of synth pop and new wave, was wonderfully played by The Wedding Singer band, directed by Catherine Snider.
As with every major performing arts production, the student crew proved invaluable.