Key City offers free online theater warmup exercises

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The Key City Public Theatre continues to pass on insights into the dramatic arts even as the playhouse’s doors remain shuttered.

Maggie Jo Bulkley, a KCPT ensemble actor who has been in six productions within the past year, is also a culinary artist with her own YouTube channel.

Bulkley and her partner, KCPT education director Brendan Chambers, are now also offering free online theater warmup exercises via YouTube, under the freshly minted “Key City Public Theatre” channel at shorturl.at/DKLQ9.

KCPT created the channel shortly before its first video, running 49 seconds, was posted March 24; its most recent video runs 4 minutes, 36 seconds.

Bulkley and Chambers credited KCPT’s executive artistic director, Denise Winter, with contacting them to discuss ways in which KCPT could “connect and reach out” to patrons and community members during a time of isolation.

“We first talked about some sort of educational workshop online, which morphed into these shorter videos,” Bulkley said. “Warm-ups are useful because many of us are holding meetings online and just looking for fun and interesting ways to break up our days.”

Chambers said each video builds on the previous ones, which will remain online on the KCPT YouTube channel.

“At the end of the videos, you'll be able to structure your very own warm-ups, based on a ton of techniques we guide you through,” Chambers said.

Chambers and Bulkley assured their prospective online pupils that their video series is just getting started and far from wrapping up.

“We ultimately hope to reach not only our patrons, but our student actors and anyone else who would like to participate,” Bulkley said. “There's no age range or particular demographic we’re targeting. The people of Port Townsend are our demographic.”

By posting the videos on their own Youtube channel, KCPT allows folks to review any videos in that series as many times as they wish.

“Being in a class of maybe 10 people, we would have to push on with the exercises,” Chambers said. “But online, you have a different sense of community. You can subscribe to our channel, tune into every video and build community that way.”

That being said, Chambers and Bulkley agreed that theater is more effective in person, and admitted online instruction therefore presents its own set of challenges.

“In a classroom, we as instructors would be able to read the class a little better and adjust our exercises and curriculum to the specific people in the room,” Bulkley said. “Ultimately, we strive to build a strong ensemble. That’s hard to do online, but these videos are a fun way we can share our tools on how we pursue it.”

Some lessons that Bulkley and Chambers have learned will remain applicable when they return to in-person theatrical instruction.

“Specificity is key,” Chambers said. “It's something we talk about a lot in theater—specificity in direction and movement—but being more conscious of just how ‘short and sweet’ we can make a lesson, as part of our warm-up videos, and have it make sense is really important.”

The duo noted that subscribers to the KCPT YouTube channel can enjoy their videos while wearing comfortable clothes.

“So far, we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback,” Chambers said. “Our community is excited and ready to participate. We’ve even gotten some requests for certain warm-ups.”

“We wanted to make these videos fun and short,” Bulkley said. “Breaking the exercises into shorter segments will hopefully entice our viewers to check in more frequently to catch the latest video.”

The duo aims to post new videos roughly once a week, at an average length of two to three minutes each.