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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
Please see below for an update on the Summer Shakespeare Intensive.
Month-Long Intensive
Greetings to you all near and far, Our devotion and commitment to the Center for Actor Training involves transparency and inclusion in all ways. We have been working with diligence and care to keep the doors open to the many rooms in the Training program and though we have had to make the following tough but wise decision, we have you all in mind while hoping for your safety and well being. Due to the on-going COVID-19 crisis, we are canceling the 2021 Month-Long Intensive, and we are currently developing a series of virtual workshops to offer in January 2021. I am looking forward to the time of change when the virus has passed us and we can be in 'the room' together making what we make and enjoy as theater artists. We will be sharing our for January plans with you all very soon. Stay tuned! With my best wishes, Susan Dibble, Interim Director Center for Actor Training
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.
Online Classes and Workshops/In-Person Specialized Workshops
The Center for Actor Training typically 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. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all programming is currently being offered online.
Meet the Faculty
Kevin Vavasseur
Kevin Vavasseur is a theater artist whose credits include work at Highways Performance Space, Theater @ Boston Court, Odyssey Theater, Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, H.E.R.E, Company of Angels, Los Angeles Theater Center, Sacred Fools, Edinburgh International Arts Festival, New York International Fringe Festival, London Shakespeare Studio and Lincoln Center. An NAACP Image, GLAAD Media and Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award nominee for acting, he is a Lincoln Center Directors' Lab alum and a Stage Directors and Choreographers Union associate member. He has done the Shakespeare & Company Winter Intensive as both a participant and teacher trainee and was a participant in the 2014 Shakespeare & Company 13-week Conservatory, where he played “Friar Laurence” in the Conservatory production of “Romeo and Juliet”. He once had a recurring role on the NBC sitcom “A Different World” and played a pirate in Steven Spielberg’s children’s classic, “Hook”.
He has also worked in film and television production having been a First Assistant Director in music videos, shooting top musical acts including, Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, The Whispers, Troop and Stevie Wonder. He’s also worked as Creative Assistant to the President Worldwide Production, as well as Executive Assistant to the Vice Chairman, at Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Entertainment, where he worked on many feature films including, Men in Black, Air Force One, Bad Boys, Memoirs of a Geisha and The Cable Guy.
In September 2016, Kevin completed a Master of Arts degree at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study where he self-designed his curriculum which combined theater, gender studies and sociology. His research examines how live theater can provide an experience of empathy for audience members, which may be taken outside of the performing space to contribute to a more inclusive society. www.KevinVavasseur.com, www.KevinNotes.org
From the Alumni
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
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
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
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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.