Workshops - Registration Now Open

Led by Fiona Banks (Head of Learning for Globe Education), with Globe Education Practitioners, this practical workshop will offer participants active approaches to teaching Shakespeare in the classroom, and consider the ways in which core activities can be adapted for different age-groups and across texts.

This practical workshop explores approaches to performing Shakespeare via the consideration of ‘original’ theatrical practices and aims to contribute to the current debate about what current theatre practice can learn from early conditions of performance. Focussing particularly on Shakespeare’s ‘mad’ figures, Ophelia and Edgar’s Tom O’Bedlam, participants will be guided through practical exercises that examine the differences between performing ‘mad’ in Shakespeare’s theatre and now.
 
The workshop is suitable for anyone interested in theatre practice as research, in the history of madness in the theatre and in developing practical strategies in their teaching.
 
The workshop develops the work of Rob Conkie and Bridget Escolme in the workshop Shakespeare Now and Then, at the Shakespeare Association of America conference, Washington DC, 2009.
 
To register, please contact Bridget Escolme by 15 August 2009 (b.m.escolme@qmul.ac.uk)

Our workshop begins by taking a cue from Henry V on ‘idol ceremony’ to introduce questions about the nature of ceremony: is ceremony always a local phenomenon, a unique event depending on the customs and practices of a particular place and time? Isn't ceremony also trans-historical (carrying traces of tradition), and global (catering to common human needs as part of face-saving strategies or the ritual management of the stages of life)? What happens when ceremony is re-enacted within a performance? Does the staged ceremony retain any of the ritualistic or emotional power of the original? How might audiences participate in staged ceremonies in past and in contemporary performances? How can everyday or occasional ceremonies be used as pedagogical tool? How do ceremonies function in different theatre venues or different geographical performance sites?
 
We will use practice-based work to explore some of these questions, looking at extracts from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and Middleton's Women Beware Women. We will consider the apparently everyday ceremonies of greetings and partings alongside important rituals such as weddings and spectacular ceremonial occasions like processions. Having worked on these together and discussed them, the workshop leaders will offer ideas about how staged ceremonies might work in performance: engaging spectators intellectually and emotionally in the troubling questions raised by the plays. Ceremony, we argue, provides a mechanism to acknowledge, display and contain the risks of social engagement across same sex and heterosexual axes. It is an important means by which the local becomes the global, by which the local Shakespeare of the Globe becomes Shakespeare of the globe.
 
In spite of the content of the texts (for which we claim no responsibility), this workshop is suitable for all ages. The practical element of the workshop will be gentle and won’t require any acting experience, just an interest in the topic. Extracts will be provided.
 
To register, please contact Alison Findlay (a.g.findlay@lancaster.ac.uk) and Liz Oakley-Brown (e.oakley-brown@lancaster.ac.uk) by 15 August 2009