Workshop Descriptions
Shakespeare Forever
Shakespeare Forever is a performance workshop for theater students and professionals to develop the technique, skills and craft necessary for the performance of Shakespeare’s plays. The workshop will also develop students’ imaginations, aesthetic inclinations, and personal processes as artists to make sure that an aesthetic identity evolves synergistically with the acquisition of technique.
Actors will learn to render Shakespeare’s language with clarity and confidence and perform his texts in an immediate, inspired and personal way, making Shakespeare’s characters, stories, and ideas come passionately alive.
Shakespeare’s plays provide the ultimate vehicle for the expression of the actor’s art, and learning to perform Shakespeare is among the best ways for actors to master their craft. Also, learning how to play Shakespeare enhances an actor’s ability to handle other writers and genres, improves audition skills, and increases the chances of booking work in all mediums.
Using David Edelstein’s approach to playing Shakespeare as a framework, participants will investigate and acquire the techniques of paraphrasing, antithesis, height, rhythm, irony, and the concepts of given circumstances, objectives, actions, obstacles, improvisation, and repetition. Students will also learn all the key elements of scansion needed to analyze, decode and fully realize the underlying metric score Shakespeare purposefully embedded in the text to direct actors.
Over a period of ten weeks, Shakespeare Forever will simulate elements of a professional rehearsal process by focusing all scene work on a single play. Also, the workshop will incorporate methods of master teachers Patrick Page, Peter Francis James, Joseph Siravo, André Serban, John Barton, and Peter Brook.
When actors engage in empty declamation, misunderstood characterizations, poor expressions of circumstances and an every-word-is-equally-important approach to Shakespeare’s language, it’s no wonder that so many are often frustrated when seeing Shakespeare’s plays. It’s not the song and it’s not the audience, it’s the singer. Shakespeare Forever will reverse this phenomenon by empowering actors with the skills, craft and aesthetic imagination necessary to create an artistically intoxicating experience for an audience.
Chekhov/Gorky
Chekhov/Gorky is a performance workshop designed to introduce theater students to the plays of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky and to use these foundational texts of naturalistic theater to learn the core acting techniques and performance methods of Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky. The workshop will also develop students’ imaginations, aesthetic inclinations, and personal processes as artists to make sure that an aesthetic identity evolves synergistically with the acquisition of technique.
The plays of Chekhov and Gorky offer among the richest tapestry of human characters, human psychologies, and human emotions ever created in the history of the theater. Rich, poor, young, old, educated, ignorant, powerful, weak, conservative, liberal, urban, rural, wise, naive, joyous, depressed, hopeful, cynical, etc., Chekhov and Gorky’s characters contain virtually the full range and scope of the modern human experience. As such, their plays are among the best material for actors to use to learn the arts of acting, theater making and storytelling as a whole.
In the Chekhov/Gorky workshop actors will learn an array of methods from Stanislavsky’s system of actor training. Actor’s will learn to apply the techniques of given circumstances, objectives, actions, bits and tasks, concentration of attention, adaptation and improvisation. In this way, actors will give dynamic life to Chekhov and Gorky’s stories and inhabit their characters in highly personal, immediate, and theatrical ways.
Additionally, learning to perform Chekhov and Gorky through Stanislavsky’s system of actor training enhances an actor’s ability to handle other writers and genres, improves audition skills, and increases the chances of booking work in all mediums. Chekhov/Gorky will also impart skills devised by Stanislavsky's master students Uta Hagen and Sandy Meisner, as well as incorporate the methods of master teachers Nikos Psacharopoulos, André Serban, and Peter Brook.
The Chekhov/Gorky workshop will empower actors with the skills, craft, confidence and aesthetic imagination necessary to create an artistically intoxicating experience for an audience.