SPRING BREAK ARTS CAMP!
WED: STORYTELLING WITH WONDERWOOD’S
MIKE BENNETT, FRANK, & HEAVEN-LEIGH
RECOMMENDED AGES: ~8-11 (3rd-5th grade)
PRICE: Sliding scale, $40 or $60 per day
*register for the full week & automatically get one day free!
DATES: Monday, March 24 - Friday, March 28
TIME: Drop-off 8:30-9am ; Pick-up 3-3:30pm
Wednesday, March 26th: STORYTELLING with Wonderwood’s Mike Bennett, Frank, & Heaven-Leigh
For this special day of our Featured Artists Spring Break Camp, we're bringing you THREE artists from the magical Wonderwood Springs! Over the course of the day, campers will explore various mediums for storytelling!
Mike Bennett will lead a keychain making workshop, where campers will bring something from their imagination to life as a tangible, 3d object. Using wood and paint, campers will paint an object, creature, animal, whatever they want! Mike will also bring trinkets from his personal collection to be transformed! Together they will turn the trinket / painting into a keychain!
Frank will guide campers in a mini clown school, where she will teach the art of storytelling through body, face, and vocal effects. Campers will be guided in creating a character to embody and create key tenants of this character, i.e. how they move, how they talk, how they think; and practice stepping into a character and acting. This will include warm up exercises popular in theater, and a little history of clowning as performance.
Heaven-Leigh will guide campers through a world building workshop where they'll use written words to build a world (or many worlds) in a sci fi future! Campers will practice using what they already know to build new things, like creating new weather or money systems, new languages, new days of the weeks and months, etc., and write some basic information about their imagined world. Campers will create a short story featuring their trinket they created with Mike and the character they worked on with Frank incorporated into their new world.
Wonderwood Springs is a fantasy gathering place and a unique coffee shop and restaurant experience in the St Johns neighborhood of North Portland. The Wonderwood universe also includes a 7,000 square foot immersive mini golf experience and gift shop. You can find the ILYouth2 community at Wonderwood Springs on the second Monday of each month from 5-8pm, for our special art hangouts!
Mike Bennett is an illustrator, immersive space designer, and self-proclaimed public joy creator. A lifelong cartoon enthusiast, Mike creates outdoor art via lawn signs, scavenger hunts, and educational displays like A to Zoo. Mike has built a community of 2 million+ global social media followers and immersive experiences like Dinolandia, a prehistoric adventure, and Wonderwood Springs, a fantasy-inspired cafe, restaurant, and mini-golf course. Wonderwood Springs is located in the St. Johns neighborhood in North Portland and is open for adventurers of all ages to explore the magic and wonder contained within its walls.
Emily “Frank” Newton is an international comedic performer. Originating from Australia, she now resides in Portland, Oregon. Emily has performed both nationally and internationally with companies including Terrapin Puppet Theater (AUS), Oregon Children’s Theater (OR, USA), CoHo Productions (OR, USA), The Children’s Art Theater of China (Shanghai, CHN), and Dell’Arte International (CA, USA). Newton is interested in creating/performing eccentric, fully embodied characters that live in direct contact with an audience. Her work reflects an ongoing interest in exploring the boundaries between performer and audience. Emily holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Ensemble-Based Physical Theater from Dell’Arte International CA, is the co-artistic director of the CoHo Clown Cohort (PDX), and is a faculty member of the Institute of Contemporary Performance in Portland, Oregon.
Heaven-Leigh is ready for a good time and believes that we could all get there together if everyone just read a little more.She holds an MA in Critical Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Arts and will not shut up about science fiction. She’s always like, “What is this text really saying?” and “Could we learn something from this?” and “Thinking we should start to build the world we want instead of letting the current state of things numb us and freeze us out from our potential teehee.” While pursuing both her undergraduate and graduate degrees, she gained experience working in a diverse range of spaces, including psychology labs, classrooms, and art centers, and facilitated two international conferences in Berlin, Germany. She currently leads semi-regular reading seminars at Parallel Worlds bookstore and works with Mike and Frank at Wonderwood Springs in St. Johns.