For Teachers
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We rely on the generous support of people like you to sustain our tradition of artistic excellence, and secure a bright future for our Company.
Center For Actor Training
The very heart of Shakespeare & Company is its professional actor training. The aesthetic of the Company was created within the training devised by Tina Packer and the Master Teachers, and it is through these programs that the aesthetic is continually investigated, redefined, and reinvigorated.
Through the Center for Actor Training, Shakespeare & Company’s performance artists, education artists, and artist-managers develop a common artistic vocabulary and coherent approach to performing Shakespeare that provides a solid foundation for their work. Actors, directors, writers, and teachers from all over the world come to work with the Company’s faculty to train not only their voices and their bodies with a daily regimen of demanding classes, but also to delve deeply into their own imaginations, intellects, and emotional lives.
Shakespeare & Company’s curriculum is internationally recognized as a deeply effective training experience for actors who aspire to bring their talent, intuition, and spirit to a higher level.
Donate To DKFF
The Dennis Krausnick Fellowship Fund (DKFF) provides financial assistance for artists of color to participate in our professional training programs.
Actor Training Programs
Summer Shakespeare Intensive
Modeled after our internationally acclaimed Month-Long Intensive, the Summer Shakespeare Intensive (formerly the Summer Training Institute) provides young actors the opportunity to immerse themselves in Shakespeare six days a week for four weeks during our summer performance season.
Month-Long Intensive
Create a new relationship with Shakespeare’s text, with yourself as an actor, and with your place in the world of theatre. The Month-Long Intensive is Shakespeare & Company’s cornerstone workshop. The unique power of the program is in its rigorous compacted schedule. For six days a week, from 8:00am until 10:00pm, participants immerse themselves in voice, movement, text analysis, exploration of the actor/audience relationship, sonnet work, scene work, clown, stage fight, and in-depth discussions about the function of theatre and the role of the actor in today’s world.
Weekend Intensive
Designed to meet the needs of professional actors and theater students who seek an introduction to Shakespeare & Company's training methods as well as alumni who wish to refresh and reconnect with the work, the Weekend Intensive integrates voice, movement, and monologue work. Participants explore ways to unlock the emotional and intellectual content inherent in Shakespeare's language, yielding a direct relationship between actor and text.
Specialized Workshops
The Center for Actor Training offers a variety of specialized workshops throughout the year exploring a full range of disciplines including rhetoric, wit, clown, fight, voice, movement, public speaking and more!
Meet the Faculty
Susan Dibble
Susan Dibble is a choreographer, dancer, teacher and painter. She graduated from SUNY College at Purchase with a B.F.A. in Dance in 1976. In 1979, Susan was a participant in the first Shakespeare & Company January Intensive. Susan is a founding member of Shakespeare & Company where she has worked for the past 39 years as a master teacher of movement and dance for actors, movement director and choreographer. In 1987, after teaching at a variety of universities including NYU Tisch MFA in Acting Program, Susan joined the faculty of the Theater Arts Department at Brandeis University, where she is a full professor and teaches Movement for Actors, Modern Dance, Choreography, Clown, Mask, Period Styles, and Historical Dance. She has been on the faculty at Brandeis for 31 years and served as Theater Arts Department chair for 8 years. Susan is the director of Susan Dibble Dance Theater and has performed her work for over 40 years in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont as well as numerous times at Shakespeare & Company in the program “DibbleDance”. She has worked as a choreographer and movement director for the Actors' Shakespeare Project, Berkshire Theatre Group, Manhattan Theatre Club, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, The Nora Theater and The Underground Railroad Theatre. Susan has taught at The Elements Theater, Yale School of Drama, New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts, the Denver Center Performing Arts Center, University of Ohio, University of Utah and Webster College. Susan received the 2006 Leonard Bernstein Festival of Creative Arts Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Arts at Brandeis.
From the Alumni
Teresa Spencer
The most important thing I’ve taken from the Conservatory has been a sense of professionalism. I used to consistently walk into auditions feeling the terror of unpreparedness: even if I’d rehearsed my monologue or sides forwards and backwards, I would arrive at an audition and suddenly feel overtaken with a sense of not knowing what the hell I was doing, more
Jenna Hoff
All of the vocal and physical training we did enabled me to see how much freedom and availability are possible, which raised my expectations of myself. But for the first time I felt that I had the tools to move forward with those expectations. I can hone, clarify and broaden my Shakespeare monologues (and other pieces, too!), and I gained more
Lulu Fogarty
My experience at the 2007 Summer Training Institute was absolutely priceless….I learned to bring a sense of play to everything I do. Play might be the most important tool for an actor but it’s surprising how quickly we forget to play because we try to be ‘right.’ There is no such thing as ‘right.’ To me, this is what the more
Maura Matarese
I attend at least one workshop at Shakespeare & Company each year as it always allows me an opportunity to grow as actor, to continue to free my actor’s instrument, to meet exciting new artists from around the world, and to spend time in an environment I love, with a faculty whom I deeply respect. more
Halima Henderson
I’ve kept busy over the past year, and I have to say that weekend intensive has proven to be very effective! Everyone always asks about it when they see it on my resume and I love waxing poetically about it! Not only that, friendships that I made during my weekend have been long-lasting, I love running into folks at auditions more
Bring a Group & Save
Groups of 12 or more receive discounted tickets & other benefits
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Attention Actors!
Our Actor Training curriculum is internationally recognized. Bring your talent to a higher level.
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Shakespeare & Company is a professional live theatre company in the heart of the Berkshires, presenting a vibrant summer performance season featuring the works of Shakespeare in repertory with classic and contemporary plays. The Company offers one of the most extensive actor training programs by a regional theatre in the country, and is also home to an award-winning and nationally recognized theatre-in-education program.