American Shakespeare Center Workshops
2019 Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference
June 28-30 (Marietta College)
Information on ASC Workshops in PDF
The workshops will focus on preparing participants to develop their analysis of Shakespeare through text and performance. Additionally, the workshops will help them realize the variety of choices in stage moments and scenes that Shakespeare’s texts offer. There will be four different workshops. Each will be offered twice to provide participants sufficient opportunities to attend.
The four workshops will explore the following areas:
SHAKESPEARE’S VERSE
Tear down the monolith of Shakespeare’s text and unlock the choices available for character development in verse and prose. Shakespeare’s verbal patterns make the plays more energetic, more realistic, and more emotional, both on-stage and in the classroom. You will mine the text for these clues just as Shakespeare’s actors do.
RHETORIC
If we still use 98% of the words Shakespeare used, then why is he sometimes hard to understand? This workshop cracks the code by breaking down figures of speech and illuminating them as clues for character. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it-and you might start using the techniques in your own communication.
CUE SCRIPTS
This exploration takes participants on the journey Shakespeare’s actors made when they received their roles. Students will explore the essential information and playing prompts offered by the technology of script distribution in the period. Drawing from Tiffany Stern’s and Simon Palfrey’s Shakespeare in Parts, activities include examining repeated and double cues, as well as the unique (but active) listening required to function with limited, but specific information.
TEXTUAL VARIANTS
Half of Shakespeare’s plays exist in more than one early modern text, and the rest have been edited, modified, and adapted for hundreds of years. This workshop empowers participants to take the text back from the first publishers and choose the best story for the present. Celebrate the opportunity to create a new performance using the words Shakespeare wrote.
About the American Shakespeare Center’s Education Outreach:
The American Shakespeare Center’s approach to Shakespeare embraces the way that his facility with language reflects his knowledge of the stage. Teachers have long recognized the beauty inherent in Shakespeare’s words but may struggle to impart the joy of staging that language to students, many of whom are afraid of a text that has for so long been divorced from the meaning it has on stage. Close reading of the plays not only reveal insights into the stage for which Shakespeare wrote, but they also become tools to crack open the text and see the multiple clues for interpretation offered by the analysis of rhetoric, meter, and staging clues. ASC Education Artists assist teachers and students both in appreciating his plays and in thinking through the performance choices inherent in them. Moreover, given the ASC’s history of performance and educational training –producing since 1988 in repertory, on tour and in our own re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse, the Blackfriars and, since 1992, sharing with teachers tactics for embracing Shakespeare’s stagecraft as a means to open up his plays for them and their students–there may be no better venue for this careful study. Additionally, ASC Education has worked with more than 4,000 high school students in intensives that examine the staging of productions and in classes employing elements of Shakespeare’s stagecraft, helping students connect to the plays in compelling ways that engender a life-long love of them.
To find out more about the American Shakespeare Center, check out their site at:
https://americanshakespearecenter.com/