Ashland Center for Theatre Studies

Past Elective Course

Bring Shakespeare to Life: Text to Performance

A weeklong 3-credit graduate level course geared toward high school and community college theatre educators, which will cover how to work with student actors to take Shakespeare's plays from the text to performance:

• Investigate how to approach and direct Shakespeare's plays
• Practice techniques to "activate" Shakespeare's text
• Discover quick, easy methods for working out of the First Folio to mine specific, choice-making detail
• Uncover the rhetorical base of Shakespeare's writing style
• Re-discover English Renaissance ideals and their influence on Elizabethan playwrights
• Explore how to bring Shakespeare's use of metaphor, simile, personification, and picturization alive on the stage
• Consider some striking parallels between Shakespeare's style of writing and pop, hip hop, and rock
• Discuss and analyze the Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions of Macbeth, Henry VIII, and Much Ado About Nothing
• Come away with practical exercises to use in rehearsal and the classroom

Faculty

G Valmont Thomas, Director and Oregon Shakespeare Festival Actor
Don Weingust, SOU Center for Shakespeare Studies

Daily Schedule

Evening Schedule 2009