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
Merry Conway
Merry Conway is a teacher, and performer. She teaches workshops in a range of subjects: Movement for Actors, Clown, and has developed original pedagogy on The Embodied Humors, Wit and Wordplay and The Fool. Merry trained with Trish Arnold in London and her work has continued to provide a strong foundation for Merry’s thought. Merry is a Founding Teacher at Shakespeare & Company, having taught at the first January workshop, bringing movement as well as Clown into the Company pedagogy, for several years thereafter. She became the Clownmaster there in 1983, and through the company, received and NEA grant to study Clown and Fool in Shakespeare. She has also taught at LA Women’s Shakespeare Company, Actor’s Shakespeare Project, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Emerson University, and Brandeis University. She is a regular teacher at the Linklater Center in New York, and co-teaches with Kristin Linklater at the Kristin Linklater Center in Orkney. In the past five years, she has taught many workshops in Italy as well as her own workshops in New York City. For 20 years Merry was a performer and co-producer of Conway & Pratt Projects which created large-scale, installations with performance along with her collaborator, Noni Pratt. She has danced with Susan Dibble for many, many years and valued the creative exchange. Merry is delighted to mark the circle completing on 40 years, returning to Shakespeare & Company for this workshop.
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
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
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
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
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
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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.