Visits to Schools

Due to cast and crew members’ work schedules, it is usually not possible to transport a full mainstage show to schools,

but we have a small group of actors available for school visits!

If you would like to have us visit your school, please give us plenty of notice, so that we can prepare adequately.

The best times of the year are outside of our March-May mainstage crunch time.

Some possibilities:

1) A visit by a few members of our company, to do a free-form Q&A with students and/or watch students perform (e.g. if the students have been preparing scenes for a class). This can be done with small or large groups of students. (We have done this at Seoul Foreign British School for the last two years, and it was a great way to interact with the students.)

2) Taught workshops on Shakespeare or acting in general (class sizes must be small enough for this to be effective. Around 20 students at a time should be the maximum--around 12 is ideal--and there will need to be room for the students to move around the room.)

3) A small scenes performance: A small group of actors from our company performing a collection of Shakespeare scenes and/or monologues. (Fully rehearsed scenes are possible, but staged readings can be done more easily, and would make it possible for us to cater to the particular scenes you’d like us to perform.) Our production Love and Despair in 2015 was designed as an example of what fully-rehearsed, very small scenes show might look like. (See videos of Love and Despair in our Video Archive.)

4) A combination lecture/demonstration (like John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiUe9vnibnQ&t=2719s), but geared toward students), in which we talk about concepts in Shakespeare or in acting and use performances of scenes or speeches to demonstrate these concepts.

If there are particular concepts you'd like us to cover, just let us know.

Some ideas of concepts to talk about:

1. Themes in Shakespeare’s plays, showing scenes from various plays that illustrate the themes

2. Plot points or themes in a particular play, focusing on scenes and speeches from that one play (e.g. if your students are studying, or have studied, a particular play)

3. Acting techniques (in general, or for performing Shakespeare). Some examples would be:

"Taking it off the page" technique, from Harold Guskin's book How to Stop Acting, which is great for actors of all levels to help with truthful acting and memorization,
using iambic pentameter,
balancing emotion and intellect in Shakespeare's plays,
dealing with rhyming couplets as an actor
exploring the same character in different ways

We understand that different schools and organizations have different financial resources. If you would like to have us come for a visit, feel free to make a financial offer that fits your organization’s budget, and we’ll see what we can do!