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July 15, 2023
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Professional Development Workshops
Program Dates
January 3 to 29, 2023
Arrival: Monday, January 2 Departure: Monday, January 30
Tuition Fees
$4,875 USD
Early payment discount: Pay the full tuition by October 15 and save $600.
Designed for Teachers, Directors and Teaching Artists to help create dynamic, engaging learning experiences of Shakespeare in the classroom and on the stage. Participants in this program are eligible for Professional Development points.
Shakespeare & Company’s unique and long-developed techniques awaken the emotional, imaginative and physical dimensions of the text. Teachers learn appropriate strategies to help students experience the power and beauty of Shakespeare’s language, and to engage with the texts in deeper and more personal ways. Brought back to the classroom and rehearsal rooms, these approaches engage students’ own multiple intelligences, enabling a more passionate, personal, and comprehensive experience of the characters and understanding of the plays.
These workshops are designed by Kevin G. Coleman, Shakespeare & Company’s Education Director. Other master teachers, actors, and directors from the Company may join the faculty to help participants to experience, and then develop, their own dynamic and engaging learning experiences of Shakespeare in the classroom and on the stage.
These Workshops offer ways to create dynamic and engaging learning experiences of Shakespeare in the classroom and on the stage.
Content includes
- The most effective methods for freeing both students’ and teachers’ creativity and for building playful and emotionally safe and intellectually rigorous classrooms.
- An organic and engaging experience of the rhetorical structure inherent in the verse, and a way of presenting it to students that is liberating and exciting; more about Shakespeare’s rhetoric, less about scansion.
- Ways of approaching and presenting the different types of comic characters, clowns and fools, and comic moments in the most often presented plays.
- Ways of effectively managing the presentation of physical violence in Shakespeare’s plays tracing the journey from shaming incidents to the resulting violence, to entire battle scenes. Responsible ways of exploring the violent parts of the stories, and appropriate ways of presenting violence.
- Profound ways for students to meet Shakespeare on multiple levels that create deep, personal meanings for students and teachers alike.
Each Week-Long Workshop includes
- Handouts of the strategies and rationale for each exercise and activity
- Time allotted for observations, questions and discussion
- Ticket to one Shakespeare production
- Optional evening performances: other theatre offerings (discounted tickets)
- Optional evening classes: Directing Student Productions; Stage Combat
- Free evenings to explore the Berkshires (vs. optional plays, optional classes)
Professional Development Workshop
On Teaching and Directing Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare & Company’s unique and long-developed Education work awakens the emotional, imaginative, and physical dimensions of the text. Teachers gain hands-on experience and appropriate strategies to help their students experience the power and beauty of Shakespeare’s language. This workshop is designed to engage with texts in deeper and more personal ways. It not only offers a new way of approaching Shakespeare in classrooms, but also practical, structure-based methodologies and techniques for the rehearsal room!
These approaches engage students’ own unique learning patterns and multiple intelligences, enabling a more comprehensive conversance with the plays. Students and teachers alike have discovered new ways of experiencing through this work, which changed and evolved over 40 years.
Session Options
- July 10-15, 2023
Each 6-Day workshop includes:
- 36 hours of Professional Development credit
- Handouts of the strategies and rationale for each activity
- Tickets to the Mainstage shows at Shakespeare & Company
- Optional evening classes, such as: Directing Student Productions, Stage Combat, and much more!
- Limited Housing is available upon request through the generosity of our Volunteer Company. This helps offset the high cost of housing in the Berkshires during the summer months!
Tutition: $900
NOTE: Here in the Education Department, we are acutely aware of the toll Covid has taken on teachers. In the spirit of supporting fellow educators. Please reach out to us to discuss financial assistance, should you need it
Please contact Katilin Henderson at khenderson@Shakespeare.org with questions.
Click “APPLY NOW” above to apply!
Professional Development Weekend Workshops
with Founding Member & Director of Education Kevin G. Coleman
Learn how to create dynamic and engaging learning experiences of Shakespeare in the classroom and on stage.
Session Options
- April 28-30, 2023
Weekend Workshops Include:
- 13 Professional Development Hours from Friday Evening to Sunday Afternoon.
- Practical ways to build playful, emotionally safe, and intellectually rigorous classroom experiences.
- On your feet explorations of Shakespeare’s text and how to explore it with students.
- Building an understanding of ways for students to meet Shakespeare on multiple levels: personally, creatively, and intellectually.
- Apply this work to text from some of the commonnly used plays studied in schools (Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar).
Tutition: $400
For more information contact khenderson@Shakespeare.org.
How to Apply
Tuition for this program is $400 for one weekend workshop and $700 for both workshops. Please contact Kaitlin Henderson, Professional Development Manager, for more information about how to apply for aid at khenderson@shakespeare.org.
Housing: Housing is available for participants who may need it. For more information on housing please contact Kaitlin Henderson, Professional Development Manager at khenderson@shakespeare.org.
TO APPLY
- Click on the red “Apply Now” button on the right side of this page.
- Fill out the Application Form.
- Once you have completed your application and received awritten notice of your approval from the Education Department– you may then complete the tuition payment via the red “Make a Payment” button on the Professional Development page of our website.
“The programs created by Shakespeare & Company provide examples of excellence in professional development, teaching, and learning to be studied and adapted by other artist-teachers, classroom teachers, and teacher-trainers. Further, they provide powerful evidence that on the highest levels of literacy, in the realms of social and personal growth and development, and in the development of high-order thinking skills, the arts provide an ideal setting for multi-faceted and profound learning experiences.”
—From “Stand and Unfold Yourself,” a two-year study conducted by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (Project Zero, Steve Seidel et al.) and sponsored by the GE and MacArthur Foundations; the study was published in “Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts On Learning.”
Comments from past participants
“This workshop is exceptional…what you take away from it will enrich yours and your students’ lives way more than what you gave up to get there.” —Sharon Rae Paquette, Advice to the Players, New Hampshire
“Honestly, it was one of the best workshops of my 27 years of teaching and directing. I can’t wait to play!” —Dawn Gunderson, Moorhead High School in South Moorhead, Minnesota
“If you teach drama – Shakespeare or otherwise – this workshop will change your teaching forever, and for the better!” —Wendy Bruneau, High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire
For more information, contact Kaitlin Henderson, Professional Development Manager, at khenderson@shakespeare.org or call (413) 637-1199 ext. 108.
Course Gallery
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You will study...
.01 Linklater Voice
The full progression of Kristin Linklater’s approach to voice training for actors is taught during the four weeks by Designated Linklater voice teachers. In addition to daily classes in Linklater, voice teachers regularly join in text classes and offer specialized classes to help participants integrate the voice work into their scenes.
.02 Movement
The movement progression includes Pure Movement (Swings), Alexander Technique, physical expressivity, and dance. Participants will be guided through exercises to promote awareness of (and release from) habitual body tension, sensitivity to impulse, dynamic physical presence and stamina, delight in moving with passion and precision, and ensemble.
.03 Text Work
Basics introduces the actor to a text approach which demands an open and personal commitment to thought, word, and gesture. Basics evolves into scene work, first through Dropping In (an approach to experiencing the text on a word-by-word basis) and into text analysis and detailed scene work. Classes in Sonnet and Structure of the Verse round out the text progression, allowing actors to merge their personal connection with the form of Shakespeare’s language.
.04 Actor/Audience Relationship
The participant is invited to explore the Elizabethan world of Actor/Audience Relationship—a theatrical reality without a fourth wall, in which the immediate energy of the audience fuels the actor to reveal a deeper level of truth and experience, which in turns enkindles the audience’s ability to receive Shakespeare’s language.
.05 Clown & Stage Fight
The participant is invited to explore the Elizabethan world of Actor/Audience Relationship—a theatrical reality without a fourth wall, in which the immediate energy of the audience fuels the actor to reveal a deeper level of truth and experience, which in turns enkindles the audience’s ability to receive Shakespeare’s language.
Tuition
Full course tuition is
$4,875 USD
- Early payment discount: Pay the full tuition by October 15 and save $600.
A limited number of scholarships are available for People of the Global Majority/BIPOC artists from the Dennis Krausnick Fellowship Fund. Application and audition video due by October 15. Contact us for more information.
You will learn:
- A deeper connection of the body and voice when acting on stage
- Confidence to be fully present on stage when speaking Shakespeare's language
- An understanding of the forms and structures that support the actor’s emotional, visceral and cognitive imagination
- The skills necessary to authentically deliver Shakespeare’s language with accuracy, specificity, and clarity of thought
- A renewed trust in yourself as a theatre artist
