Tag Archives: residency program

Teaching Shakespeare on the Road: OCS Education Residency at Roanoke College

The American Shakespeare Center has a unique Educational Residency program that brings our education artists and workshops to high school and college campuses. In the last two years, we have completed weeklong residencies at high schools in Kansas and Ohio. Last week, we were at Roanoke College in Salem, VA for our first-ever college residency.

After a whirlwind summer of directing the 2013 sessions of the OCS Theatre Camp, I was curious about what it would be like to spend a week working with older, college-aged students, guiding them through nearly half a semester’s worth of workshop materials. Daniel Kennedy and Andrew Goldwasser, two OCS actors, made up the rest of our residency team. Daniel is a long-time OCS actor and is a former director for the OCS Theatre Camp. Andrew is a veteran of our touring troupe, and he will return to the Blackfriars Playhouse for our upcoming holiday season.

In the weeks leading up to the residency, I worked with our contact at the college to arrange our trip; we distributed fliers to promote the residency during the touring troupe’s production of Othello at Roanoke College, and our campus coordinator scheduled us to visit 3 classes throughout the week. In total, I planned 13 workshops, and Sarah and Cass taught 6 additional workshops for a weekend teacher seminar. In addition to the workshops, we scheduled multiple rehearsals for the students to have individual coaching on selected scenes and monologues from Shakespeare’s plays.

We arrived in Salem just past noon on Monday, in time to take a brief tour of the performing arts building and other campus facilities. The campus reminded me of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, but without the hills. Roanoke College is small, with only 2,000 undergraduate students. 10 students are enrolled as theatre majors, but several students from other departments take acting classes to fulfill their elective requirements. We visited the acting class first, and I led an introductory workshop on the basic building blocks of Shakespeare’s text: iambic pentameter, scansion, verse, and prose. None of the students in the acting class that we visited had ever performed in a Shakespeare play, and the material was completely new to them.

As the week passed, I noticed our students engaging with their texts in the cafeteria before workshops, diligently and carefully marking the stressed and unstressed beats in their scripts. One student that I worked with found paraphrasing in the OCS style to be especially helpful as she prepared to play Imogen, a character in Cymbeline.

Daniel and Andrew led workshops in rhetoric, clowning, stage combat, music, and acting choices. During one of the acting classes, the students had the opportunity to direct us as we played the first scene of Richard III . Using their newly-learned skills for identifying embedded stage directions, character and relationship clues, and the various forms of asides, the students directed us through the opening scene. Twice during the week, we met with an English class and explored embedded stage directions in the party scene (1.5) of Romeo and Juliet, and I led them in a discussion about the textual variants in the play and their effect on character development, staging, and other production choices.

On the final Friday in-class performance, there was excitement in the air. The students were nervous, even in our informal setting; we spent the week in a small black-box studio with warm honey-toned wood floors, soft lighting, and mix-matched chairs and small sofas collected through the years and re-purposed from old set pieces. We created a makeshift Elizabethan stage with the chairs surrounding the playing space on three sides.

Their performances began. We saw the brash and rude struggle between Katherina and Bianca in the Taming of the Shrew, followed by the frightful and foreshadowing scene between COCSa and Cassius on the stormy evening before Caesar’s murder; Imogen scorned Iachimo after his vile attempt to plant seeds of jealousy in her heart; Ophelia’s haunting songs gave way to the street brawl between Mercutio and Tybalt; Antony mourned over Caesar’s body; Viola evaded pursuit by Olivia in the garden while attempting to maintain her composure, even as Olivia exposed her heart to a servant who could never requite her love. The students’ scene showcase was a testament to the work that can be accomplished with only a few hours’ rehearsal and a careful analysis of the performance clues that Shakespeare provides in the text of his plays.

In our final wrap-up session following their scene showcase, I asked the students for their feedback and to help us brainstorm ways of making the residency program better. If we came back to Roanoke College, what would they like to do differently or the same? The program technical director suggested that we come back for several weeks or even a whole semester to direct a play rehearsal process from start to finish. The students enthusiastically agreed. I noted that this model was certainly something we could consider doing for them in the future. Our residency program is flexible, and currently our longest program offering is three weeks. Other students said that they would love to plan a trip to the Blackfriars Playhouse, and they all arrived at the consensus that they would commit to participating in another residency if given the opportunity. I was touched and warmed by their responses. Just as much as we would love to go back to Roanoke, we also wanted to provide advice to help them beyond the classroom. We encouraged the students to keep in touch with us throughout the year, and I encouraged several of them to inquire about our year-round internship opportunities.

Neither we nor our campus host and coordinator anticipated just how enthusiastically the students would respond to our presence and to the work we accomplished together in just a few days. The students were eager to absorb all they could from our workshops, and many of them stayed for several hours late into the evenings to work with us individually. Students re-arranged other commitments to attend our classes, and others came even when they probably needed that free time to study for other exams and tests; but Shakespeare is fun, and Shakespeare brings people together.

I’ve been fortunate to see other young students bond and create lasting friendships through collaboration and their collective pursuit to learn more about Shakespeare and the theatre of his time. This experience showed me that even in a small theatre program struggling with low enrollment, Shakespeare empowers students by giving them all the tools they need to create theatre that is engaging, inspiring, and community-building. I look forward to sharing similar experiences at other schools and campuses.

Kim Newton
Director of College Prep Programs

2011 in Review

We’re wrapping up another year in OCS Education, and 2011 has been full of excitement and surprises.

  • Our biggest event of the year was the 6th Blackfriars Conference, held in late October. With over 150 presenters in both plenary and colloquy sessions; keynotes from George T. Wright, Scott Kaiser, Tiffany Stern, and honoree Stephen Booth; OCS productions and special late-night performances; banquets; parties; and after-parties, this year’s conference was a rousing success.
  • Our summer camps were more successful than ever. At the American Shakespeare Center Theatre Camp, six troupes across two sessions performed in an hour-long version of early modern plays (in a “Greek to me Summer”, the plays were all set in Greece); participated in master classes including stage combat, dance, music, acrobatics, and maskwork; attended academic classes in theatre history, scansion/rhetoric, classics, and source study; and visited the Blackfriars Playhouse to watch the professional Resident and Touring Troupe actors rehearse and perform in our summer season of plays. This was the first summer we offered college credit for the camp. Our Midsummer Day Camp welcomed students ages 9-12 for an adventurous week of creative play, imagination, and fantasy, culminating in a final performance of Twelfth Night. Enthusiasts of all ages came to Staunton for the second year of the No Kidding Shakespeare Camp for Adults. We’re already looking forward to the 2012 camps; applications and registrations are now open: OCSTC; MSDC; NKSC.
  • We introduced a new program in 2011: OCS Family. An OCS Family membership has many benefits, including discounted tickets, free Playhouse tours, and free admission to OCS Family events, where we bring the community into the Playhouse. In September, we welcomed musicians and artists; our next OCS Family event, “Taste of Staunton” is on January 21st and will feature local restaurateurs.
  • The OCS also hosted recitation competitions for Poetry Out Loud and the English Speaking Union. At the ESU Nationals in New York in May, Ralph Alan Cohen served as a judge, and the OCS awarded a full OCSTC scholarship to second-place winner Claire Hilton.
  • Our Study Guides, already improved in 2010, underwent another round of revisions. The new guides for Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and Richard III feature an expanded Basics section, introducing teachers to methods of classroom performance and engagement with the text, including scansion, paraphrasing, acting interpretation, rhetoric, and audience interaction. I’m currently working on bringing the Basics from last year’s guides up to those standards, and then I’ll start work on the 2012-2013 guides.
  • Those Study Guides form the basis for our Teacher Seminars. This year, we added a fourth seminar, a special one-day event in August. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, dozens of new attendees and old friends joined us to explore methods of performance-based learning. For the second year in a row, we’ve welcomed pre-service teachers from JMU to a mini-seminar in December, we look forward to seeing them return next year.
  • We welcomed 15 Little Academes to the Playhouse over the course of the year: 2 in February, 6 in March, 2 in April, 3 in May, 1 in August, and 1 in September. That’s up from 11 in 2010, and we hope that even more teachers will choose to bring their students to us for week-long intensives in 2012.
  • If the students can’t come to us, we’ll come to them! In October, we held our first On-Site Educational Residency in Shaker Heights, Ohio. I traveled with former OCS actors Kelley McKinnon and Chad Bradford for a week with the amazing young women of the Hathaway Brown School. We presented in both English and theatre classes, and Kelley and Chad provided rehearsal coaching for the school’s production of Macbeth.
  • Our educational opportunities aren’t just limited to students; this year, we expanded our professional training programs farther than ever. We continue our long relationship with the Federal Executive Institute, providing leadership seminars, and we’ve begun to develop programs focusing on law and finance as well.
  • Apart from bringing scholars to visit us during the Blackfriars Conference, we also attended a number of other conferences in 2011. We presented to teachers and students at the Texas Educational Theatre Association in January, and that month, representatives from the Education, Marketing, and Managing departments of the OCS attended the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference in Boulder, Colorado. In February, Sarah and I presented on Shakespeare as a Primary Source at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies’s conference in Phoenix. And in April, Ralph traveled with OCS actors James Keegan, Rene Thornton Jr., and John Harrell to the Shakespeare Association of American conference in Seattle, where Ralph presented on Falstaff and our actors presented at a workshop on Playing Shakespeare. 2012 is shaping up to be just as full of travel for the whole team, with visits planned to Sacramento, Orlando, and Boston.
  • We’re also expanding our relationships with friends across the world. Sarah and I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in May to discuss how both companies are expanding our online resources for students and teachers. Ryan Nelson from Shakespeare’s Globe visited us to present for the MBC MLitt/MFA program and to talk about digital opportunities for education, and the conference in October further expanded that relationship with a presentation given by new Globe Managing Director Neil Constable, and Director of Research Farah Karim-Cooper on their upcoming Indoor Theatre.
  • We moved the bulk of our archives to Washington and Lee University, where our materials can enjoy greater storage space and management than our facilities could offer (So for anyone who’s visited our archives in the past, that means no more cramming yourselves into that tiny, overstuffed closet). We retain the last five years’ worth of material in the offices, but we shipped everything about shows from 1987 to 2005 down to Lexington; more sections (from Education, Marketing, Development, the Board of Trustees, and on the building of the Blackfriars) will go down in Summer 2012.
  • The MBC MLitt/MFA Shakespeare in Performance program also had a full year: an all-male production of Romeo and Juliet, dueling versions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a spring thesis festival, and many other events and productions.
  • We also work with the MBC Program for the Exceptionally Gifted and Honors program each fall semester. This year’s focus word was “wisdom”, and the students explored variations of that word’s meaning through scenes from As You Like It.
  • We partnered with the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind to bring workshops to their students, as well as arranging two sign-language interpreted nights of Macbeth in April — one matinee, for their students, and one evening performance open to the public, thanks to the generosity of the interpreters, Kate O’Varanese and Laurie Shaffer, from UVA who gave us the gift of their services at no cost.
  • We said goodbye to Christina Sayer Grey and welcomed Ben Ratkowski to the team. Christina didn’t leave the OCS, but shuffled over into Marketing; if you follow the OCS on Facebook or Twitter, she’s responsible for most of that content now, as well as numerous contributions to our other promotional materials. Ben took over her job as Group Sales and Academic Relations Manager, in addition to his responsibilities as OCS Family Coordinator.
  • Education Interns always provide a bitter-sweet Hello and Goodbye. Good-bye to Natalie and Liz and David. Hello to Jane, Kyle, Brenna, Kimberly, Jennifer, Angelinne, and John. We’re so grateful for the time each of you can spend with us, and we wish you all the luck in 2012 and beyond.

You can see photos from these events on the OCS Facebook page. If you joined us in 2011, take a flip through and reawaken some memories. If you didn’t make it to Staunton, then hopefully the pictures will inspire you to join us in 2012!

So what’s ahead for OCS Education in 2012? More access to more people. We hope to reach more students and educators than ever — that means more classes coming to matinees, more young adults at OCSTC, more pre-teens at Midsummer Day Camp, more grown folks at No Kidding Shakespeare Camp, more attendees at our Teacher Seminars, more educators downloading Study Guides, more groups coming in for leadership seminars and other professional training opportunities, more podcasts featuring our actors and education artists — more of you getting to do more with us.

I hope everyone has had a lovely and safe holiday season, and that we’ll be seeing you in the coming months. The Actors’ Renaissance Season ramps up in just a few days, providing a wonderful opportunity to witness firsthand the marriage of research and scholarship with theatrical practice — so come see us soon!

Notes from the Hathway Brown residency

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 plethora of other OCS mission-driven programming that we can develop for the specific school or pull from our existing publications. It’s sort of the inverse of our Little Academes, where college professors bring their classes to us in Staunton for a custom-designed week of lectures, workshops, and play-going. The residency gives us the extra benefit of being able to reach many more students from the same school than could feasibly travel to Staunton for an extended stay. Molly Cornwell, the theater teacher at Hathaway Brown School and director of their plays, brought us in to work with everyone from 7th-graders up to college-bound seniors.

In Hathaway Brown’s fabulous black box theatre, we met with drama and English classes to introduce OCS rehearsal practices and methods of learning through performance. The acting classes did some in-depth monologue work with Kelley and Chad, bringing the nuances of Shakespeare’s language to the forefront. Several of those students are also in Cornwell’s production of Macbeth, currently in rehearsals, and so they worked on monologues or important staging moments from the play. Improv classes played word games and worked with cue scripts, while English classes examined issues of mOCSulinity, asides and audience contact, and the challenges and opportunities of playing darkness. The 7th grade intro to drama class explored the many vocal and physical choices an actor can make — and also learned how to die dramatically as Juliet. Watching a 12-year-old perform Juliet’s death so passionately that she actually creeps herself out is one of the more amusing things I’ve gotten to do lately.

We also got to work with the full cast of Macbeth, with Kelley and Chad serving as rehearsal coaches each afternoon. They encouraged the students to make big choices. Everything, they pointed out, is a choice — or at least, it should be. If you’re not making a choice, you’re throwing a line away. They also helped the actors interrogate Shakespeare’s language to find all of the delivery clues he provides. Hathaway Brown is educating some incredibly talented young women — during the week, I saw wonderful transformations as the students really dug in to the text. The witches discovered disparate identities that still worked in unison, Lady Macbeth built ways to present herself both as a powerful instigator and as a fearful madwoman, Macbeth explained his soul-shaking quandaries to the audience, and the entire cast navigated the challenges of group scenes like the revelation of Duncan’s death or the banquet featuring Banquo’s ghost. Other activities during the week included practicing safe stage combat, looking for embedded stage directions, and learning how to share focus on the stage.

I was so impressed by the young ladies at Hathaway Brown. Not only were they bright, active, and engaged, willing to experiment with Shakespeare’s text and to try new things, but they also all seemed so kind and generous, both with us and with each other. I loved that, when I asked the 7th-graders to explore different ways of delivering the first line of Macbeth — “When shall we three meet again?” — I got 18 completely different responses from each of the 18 girls, each one fully committed to her choice and excited to show it off to the rest of the class. That sort of effervescent enthusiasm was prevalent in the whole school. Everyone there really seemed to be enjoying the learning process — which is, of course, exactly what we hope for. Molly Cornwell has done a great job building her drama program, and I’m so glad the English teachers are working with her to bring new ways of looking at Shakespeare to their students.

We finished off the week with an assembly, opening with some snippets from Macbeth that the cast had worked on during the week. The Porter took on the challenge of presenting a monologue she’d only learned two days earlier, and she did an incredible job, strolling nonchalantly through the audience, mocking her classmates, and setting the tone for the rest of the hour. Then Macbeth and Lady Macbeth presented Act One, scene seven, the famous “If it were done, when ’tis done” speech and following conversation. They demonstrated wonderful focus and intensity, and I can only imagine that their classmates will be excited to see the final, finished product. Kelley and Chad performed the Macbeth-Young Siward fight, and then we demonstrated some of the workshops, in brief, that we’d done during the week with classes. Kelley had two volunteers find the delivery clues in a scene between Katharine and Petruchio, using the alliteration as a physical direction, and used cue scripts to find the moments where Romeo asks Juliet for a kiss. Chad led a group of students in a Shakespearean insult contest, and then Kelley unleashed total delightful mayhem by demanding that the faculty come up to give it a try. We ended the week on just the right note, leaving the students with the idea that Shakespeare is exciting, energetic, and an overall good time.

After one last group photo with the cast of Macbeth, it was, sadly, time to head home. Photos from the week are up on the OCS Facebook page, and I hope I’ll have video to share with you all soon. Kelley, Chad, and I had an absolutely wonderful time, and I can’t wait till the next educational residency.