Professional Development Workshops

Now offering Weekend Workshops around the country!

Join us for an intensive introduction to Shakespeare & Company’s teaching and directing methods. Focusing primarily on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the techniques and strategies you will experience can be used to explore any of Shakespeare’s plays. Participating in this workshop can reinvent what is possible in a rehearsal room and classroom, rekindle a teacher’s deep love for teaching, and help students to more deeply engage with, appreciate, and own Shakespeare for themselves.

Upcoming Weekend Workshops

February 22-24 – Lenox, MA
March 29-31 – Boston, MA
April 12-14 – NYC
May 3-5 – Lenox, MA

Tuition: $325

Workshops are limited to 12 participants.

Schedule
Friday 7pm – 10pm
Saturday 10am – 10pm
Sunday 10am – 1pm

Adequate time for meal breaks is given, though participants are responsible for their own meals.

For the February and May Weekend Workshops in Lenox, Shakespeare & Company is able to provide some on-site housing. Single rooms are available for $40/day, on a first-come first-served basis.

Weekends in September and October: Dates and location to be announced.

It is not necessary that you have performance or directing experience. These workshops are designed – ultimately – to serve and enhance the experience of the students, who may have little to no acting experience.

HOW TO REGISTER

All participants must submit a completed registration form along with a statement of purpose. This statement is a brief explanation of why you are interested in this workshop at this time.

Register Online HERE.

All programs require a non-refundable $25 registration-processing fee; this fee must accompany the completed registration. Incomplete registrations cannot be processed.

Register by Mail

Complete the registration below and send it along with the statement of purpose and registration fee to: Professional Development; Shakespeare & Company; 70 Kemble Street; Lenox, MA 01240.

Mail in Register Form

These workshops are offered each year at Shakespeare & Company at the height of our summer performance season.

August 2019 Week-Long Workshop – specific dates to be announced soon!

These workshops offer:

• The most effective methods for freeing both students’ and teachers’ creativity and for building playful and emotionally safe and intellectually rigorous classrooms.
• An organic and engaging experience of the rhetorical structure inherent in the verse, and a way of presenting it to students that is liberating and exciting; more about Shakespeare’s rhetoric, less about scansion.
• Ways of approaching and presenting the different types of comic characters, clowns and fools, and comic moments in the most often presented plays.
• Ways of effectively managing the presentation of physical violence in Shakespeare’s plays tracing the journey from shaming incidents to the resulting violence, to entire battle scenes. Responsible ways of exploring the violent parts of the stories, and appropriate ways of presenting violence.
• Profound ways for students to meet Shakespeare on multiple levels that create deep, personal meanings for students and teachers alike.

Each Week-Long Workshop includes:

• Handouts of the strategies and rationale for each exercise and activity
• Time allotted for observations, questions and discussion
• Ticket to one Shakespeare production
• Optional evening performances: other theatre offerings (discounted tickets)
• Optional evening classes: Directing Student Productions; Stage Combat
• Free evenings to explore the Berkshires (vs. optional plays, optional classes)

“The programs created by Shakespeare & Company provide examples of excellence in professional development, teaching, and learning to be studied and adapted by other artist-teachers, classroom teachers, and teacher-trainers. Further, they provide powerful evidence that on the highest levels of literacy, in the realms of social and personal growth and development, and in the development of high-order thinking skills, the arts provide an ideal setting for multi-faceted and profound learning experiences.”
—From “Stand and Unfold Yourself,” a two-year study conducted by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (Project Zero, Steve Seidel et al.) and sponsored by the GE and MacArthur Foundations; the study was published in “Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts On Learning.”

Comments from past participants:

“This workshop is exceptional…what you take away from it will enrich yours and your students’ lives way more than what you gave up to get there.” —Sharon Rae Paquette, Advice to the Players, New Hampshire

“Honestly, it was one of the best workshops of my 27 years of teaching and directing. I can’t wait to play!” —Dawn Gunderson, Moorhead High School in South Moorhead, Minnesota

“If you teach drama – Shakespeare or otherwise – this workshop will change your teaching forever, and for the better!” —Wendy Bruneau, High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire

For more information, contact Allie Galen, Professional Development Coordinator, at agalen@shakespeare.org or call 413-637-1199 ext. 160.