Turn on the lights of inspiration and knowledge.

This series makes up our 12-class core curriculum of workshops. We’ll help students break Shakespeare’s texts into pieces, like a puzzle that connects character, story, and compelling moments. When you watch the pieces come to life on stage, students will gain ownership of Shakespeare and see what educators of all kinds have espoused for years: Shakespeare is for now.

Whether your group is interested in Shakespeare’s leaders, Shakespeare’s words, or Shakespeare’s stagecraft, ASC workshops can help you turn the lights on in invigorating and illuminating ways.

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Note: Send us an email for questions regarding availability of specific workshops. We are also able to assist with financial aide on a case by case basis. Please reach out to our team via this form. 

ASC CORE CURRICULUM OF WORKSHOPS & MASTERCLASSES

A series of twelve, 60-90 min. encounters with Shakespeare that can be taken either together or individually and customized to any relevant Shakespeare performance text.

PROLOGUE

• Shakespeare’s Staging Conditions
  Step into Shakespeare’s world and explore how the staging conditions he wrote for reveal insights about the plays and playing. Gain a new perspective by thinking about Shakespeare as a theatre-maker concerned how the plays would play on the stages for which he wrote. Topics covered include: early modern theatre practices and technology, and practical ways into verse, rhetoric, stage directions, and audience interaction.

THE CORE CURRICULUM

TEXT

• Editing Shakespeare
  Follow the journey of Shakespeare’s foul papers to discover the “infinite variety” of performance and storytelling choices available to you.
• Verse
  Mine the texts we have for clues about choices available for the actor alert to the patterns (and subverted patterns) of Shakespeare’s most common poetic meter: iambic pentameter.
• Rhetoric
  Crack the code of Shakespeare’s wordplay by breaking down figures of speech and illuminating them as clues for character, staging, and communication.
• Stage Directions
  Let the text direct by excavating the embedded directions for the stage out of Shakespeare’s dialogue on the page.

ACTOR

• Cue Scripts
  Explore the essential information and playing prompts offered by the “cutting edge” technology of early modern script distribution.
• Character Play
  Build your performance toolkit and “get into character” by making vocal and physical choices about Shakespeare’s text
• Doubling
  Learn about ASC’s long-standing practice of doubling actors (based on Shakespeare’s likely practice of the same) and then put it into practice yourself by creating multiple characters within one of Shakespeare’s plays.
• Clown
  Find your physical and vocal vocabulary to awaken the unique sensibility of the Clown.

STAGING

• Audience
  Learn how to collaborate with the ever-present scene partner, the audience, in this innovative and electrifying workshop.
• Special Effects
  Stage Shakespeare’s storms, swordfights, or spells using the theatre of the imagination

• Directing
  Communicate like a director, applying your knowledge of text, acting, and staging to a scene in collaboration with current ASC actors.
  **(prerequisites required, inquire at booking)**

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*** We can customize your experience with these workshops to focus on a specific play, the general shakespeare canon, specific literary themes, Leadership and communication, and/or story-telling.