Workshops

Leader

Fundación Shakespeare Argentina (Argentina)
 

Schedule

Thursday 24 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: Vendôme.

 
 

Workshop 2

Shakespeare: Wherefore Art Thou: The places in his plays and the places that he knew
 

Leader

David Pearce, Honorary Artistic Associate of the Rose Playhouse, Bankside, London (UK)

He is a graduate of The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and since 2006 he has directed many Shakespeare plays at the venue including As You Like It, Macbeth, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis (adapted from the narrative poem) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
He organises and runs workshops on Shakespeare and the Rose for colleges and universities and in addition he works at Shakespeare’s Globe Exhibition.

 

Description

The places in his plays and the places that he knew. Part 1 (Workprint – 80 minutes).

A contemplative cinematic look at the locations that William Shakespeare wrote of in his plays, both in Britain and beyond, and the places he himself knew and frequented.

Interspersed with scenes from the plays the film also meditatively incorporates images from the natural world that Shakespeare wrote of and can still be found today, as well as his influence on other art forms such as music and painting.

 

Schedule

Friday 25 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: Maison des Mines, salle AB.

 
 

Workshop 3

Textual and verse analysis in relation to performance: a workshop to read Shakespeare from the performer’s viewpoint
 

Leader

Colin David Reese (UK)

An actor and director for over forty years, trained at The Webber Douglas Academy, London & Jacques Lecoq, Paris. Colin David Reese has worked in the UK, Canada and France, with such names as Sir John Gielgud, Harold Pinter Lauren Bacall… Specialised in Shakespeare, he attended numerous workshops – e.g. “Is Shakespeare Still our Contemporary?” (Jan Kott) and “Original Shakespeare” (Patrick Tucker) and ran many workshops on Shakespearean acting in France, UK, Netherlands, Israel, Australia… (lately at Hebrew University, Jerusalem and John Curtin College, Perth). Currently performing his play Gift to the future, celebrating John Hemminges.

 

Description

The workshop will examine speeches and scenes from several plays, comparing the First Folio with different modern edited texts : The Riverside, Peter Alexander’s Collins Tudor, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s “The Oxford Shakespeare”, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, among others – the participants being asked to read and analyse the texts from the performer’s point of view.

Shakespearean verse gives many indications to the creation of character by exploiting the iambic pentameter and deforming its structure, thereby giving indications to the actor concerning interpretation and characterisation. The use of mid-line endings, enjambments, end-stops, short lines (less than 5 feet), trochees, spondees, anapaests, assonance, alliteration, simile, metaphor and repetition are all used by the author to guide the actor, helping with character creation. Coded into the structure of his writing are instructions to the actor – where to pause, which words to stress, etc; in much the same way as a composer instructs the musicians through the use of bars and symbols. Being able to decode these instructions helps the actor to be able to create the character out of the text. Switching from verse to prose and back again, Shakespeare guides the actors through the emotional roller coaster of his plays. Shakespeare uses the whole range of linguistic devices available in the English language and they are employed for the actor to use when creating his character.

 

Schedule

Wednesday 23 April 2014, 16h-18h.

Room: V106B.

 
 

Leader

Christine Farenc (France)

Christine Farenc is an actress, director and drama teacher. She holds a PhD in theatre studies from the University Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she has directed several workshops dedicated to “Acting Shakespeare” in English. She now teaches at the University Paris 8 – Vincennes, Ecole Supérieure d’Art Dramatique de Paris and SciencesPo Paris. Her research focuses on the English and French drama repertoire, an interdisciplinary approach to acting and actors’ status, the question of artistic education as well as teaching English as a foreign language through theatre.

 

Description

Acting Shakespeare requires a physicality that is rooted in the English language. This workshop will enable the participants to explore the possibilities of embodying the veiled latin and francophone parts of Shakespeare’s English. Our exploration will be two-fold. First, specific warm-up exercises related to the iambic pentameter —the Shakespearian verse — will help the participants to begin to understand what is often referred to as the “iambic code”, which is key to playing Shakespeare. Secondly, participants will be able to put these principles into action with short extracts from the author’s works.
 

Schedule

Tuesday 22 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.

Room: V106B.

 
 

Workshop 5

Working from cue scripts: An actor’s approach to performing duologues
 

Leaders

Vanessa Ackerman and Stephanie Street (UK)

Vanessa Ackerman
As an actress, Vanessa’s credits include leading roles for companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court Theatre, the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, Theatre 503, the Finborough, and Howard Barker’s Wrestling School as well as on television and radio for the BBC and ITV.
As a director, she created a stage adaptation of Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s short stories the RSC fringe festival and for the Crossing Borders Festival in Holland. She has worked with emerging playwrights through workshops with new writing venues such as Soho Theatre and the Royal Court’ young playwright’s programmes and as a judge on the European Independent Film Festival scriptwriting competition.
She also works as a translator in English, French and Russian.
Vanessa trained at LAMDA and has an MA in Shakespeare Studies from Birmingham University’s Shakespeare Institute. She is currently pursuing doctoral studies, investigating the representation of gender and its intersection with current advances in psychology in Shakespearean performance.

Stephanie Street
Stephanie was born and grew up in Singapore. She studied English at Cambridge University before going on to train on a scholarship at LAMDA.
Her theatre work has taken her from the National Theatre to the Royal Court, The Bush, Sheffield Crucible, Liverpool Everyman and Bristol Old Vic working with directors such as Peter Gill, Max Stafford-Clark, Josie Rourke, Nina Raine, Tamara Harvey, Polly Findlay, Iqbal Khan, Mike Longhurst and Simon Reade.
Stephanie has also worked extensively in television, playing regular and lead roles in series across BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky.
As a playwright, Stephanie’s first play, Sisters, was produced at the Sheffield Crucible in 2010. Under Daniel Evans’ artistic directorship the play re-opened the Studio after the theatre’s two-year closure for refurbishment, to critical acclaim.
1n 2011, she received a whatsonstage Awards nomination for Best Solo Performance for Nightwatchman at the National Theatre.
Stephanie is also an Artistic Associate of HighTide Festival, a Selector for the National Student Drama Festival and a trustee of Shakespeare North.

 

Description

After a vocal and physical warm-up we will explore the cue script technique to work on a variety of short duologues. The session will culminate in a performance of these duologues with feedback and discussion.
 

Schedule

Saturday 26 April 2014, 15h-17h.

Room: V106B.

 
 

Leader

Julian Bowsher
Senior archaeologist / Numismatist
Research and Education
Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA)

Julian Bowsher worked in the art world for a couple of years before studying Roman archaeology at London University. He then spent a number of years on archaeological projects in Europe and the Middle East – which included the excavation of a Roman theatre in Jordan. Since joining the Museum of London in the mid 1980s he became involved with the archaeology and history of the Tudor and Stuart period.

The discovery and excavation of the Rose theatre in 1989 was a milestone in ‘Shakespearean archaeology’ and Julian has pioneered its study, bringing together archaeologists, scholars and actors. The 2009 publication of the Rose and the Globe excavations (written with Pat Miller) attracted glowing reviews and won three awards. Further books and articles on the phenomenon of Shakespeare’s theatres is appended. Julian has published five books, over 80 articles, reports and reviews, and has written about 100 unpublished reports on London sites. Further books and articles, on a range of subjects, are in progress. Julian has lectured extensively in Britain and abroad and appeared on TV and radio. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society, and Member of the Institute of Field Archaeologists.

 

Description

The archaeological discovery of the Rose and Globe, two of London’s unique ‘Shakespearean playhouses’, 25 years ago aroused great interest around the world, not least because it heralded the arrival of modern scientific archaeological work on to the new multidisciplinary ‘Shakespearean stage’. For the first time in 400 years we had physical evidence to the actual playhouses that Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew, wrote for and acted in. Since then, further discoveries have provided (in various detail) the location, size and shape of these buildings – often with evidence for rebuilding or alteration – and the spatial awareness of stage and auditorium. The excavations also revealed material evidence left behind by the people who attended and worked in these venues; management, actors and audience, such as their clothes, money, personal items and so on.

Museum of London Archaeology has a unique record in pioneering the excavation of these theatrical venues. No less than nine of these sites have been subject to archaeological investigation; the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Boars Head, the Globe, the Hope and the Phoenix as well as two of the Bankside animal baiting arenas.

Combined with documentary research, the archaeological work has illuminated many references and debunked many myths. This seminar hopes to address and discuss this myriad evidence and the numerous questions that have emerged.

 

Schedule

Thursday 24 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: V106B.