I spent the past week in Shaker Heights, OH, working with Kelley McKinnon and Chad Bradford (both formerly of the OCS touring troupe). This expedition was the first OCS educational residency, where we send a team out on location to work with students on text exploration, Shakespeare’s staging conditions, rehearsal observation and coaching, and a … Continue reading
Conferences offer unique explorations in the teaching arena. They are often one-shot one-offs, with a completely new audience, as opposed to the classes teachers nurture through a semester or year-long class. They still offer opportunities to find “A-ha” moments, though. It is the a-ha, whether mine or a student’s or participant’s at a conference, that … Continue reading
Last week, Sarah, former-intern Liz, and I went to Tempe, Arizona for the Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies conference. Their theme this year was Performance and Theatricality, so we saw it as a great opportunity to introduce the idea of the OCS to a new region and a new group of scholars. ACMRS … Continue reading
This week we are focusing on the Actor-Scholar Council — Since 2007, OCS actors have met with scholars to discuss the unique experiment of the Actors’ Renaissance Season. The mission of the Council is to provide participants with the opportunity for discovery related to the process of mounting plays and performing them at the Blackfriars … Continue reading
I’m in the process of finalizing the premiere edition of The Playhouse Insider, the magazine that the OCS is producing, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell the Internet something about it. It looks fantastic, and I pretty much can’t wait to get it out into the universe for public consumption. I’m so … Continue reading
It’s only been a couple of days since we wrapped up our inaugural No Kidding Shakespeare Camp but I already miss our “campers” and the time we spent together studying Shakespeare’s plays and the clues for reading the stage that they, and the historical culture surrounding their composition, contain. We had a FANTASTIC group of … Continue reading
Hello! It’s Mary Finch one last time to blog this Halloween morning plenary session, going from 9:00-10:15am and moderated by Terry Southerington from Mary Baldwin College. Danielle Rosvalley, Tufts University Before the Circus Came to town: Big Data, Barnum, and the Bard Rosvalley began by calling to mind the classic images of circus attached to … Continue reading
As has become traditional in March, I’m using the excuse of the upcoming Ides to expound my feelings on (and love for) Julius Caesar. This year, I want to riff off of a really excellent post about the play from what might seem like an odd source: The Tor Blog. Tor, for those who don’t know, … Continue reading
To continue on … Whitney Egbert here again live blogging the final keynote session of the Blackfriars conference which will run from 10:30am to 11:15am this morning. Abigail Rokison of The Shakespeare Institute will be giving a presentation entitled Shakespeare Verse Speaking: The Actor and the Text. Rokison will be assisted by actors Daniel Kennedy, … Continue reading
I’m Charlene V. Smith, and I’ll be liveblogging Plenary Session I from 1pm to 2:15pm. Leslie Thomson, University of TorontoThe Tempest and the Stage-Sitters Thomson starts by pointing out that the King’s Men had already started using the Blackfriars by the time that Shakespeare started writing The Tempest. Thus he would have known that the … Continue reading