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Instructors: Michael A.C. Claridge
Event type:
Practice class
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.211
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
4,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 45
Registration group: CS IV BS/ELC
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
N.B. previous acting experience is NOT required for participation!
Elizabethan actors had no director to tell them what to do, and stage sets were almost non-existent. Using his own acting experience, William Shakespeare filled his playscripts with hints as to how to perform them, and clues for his audience about when, where and why the action is taking place. He also gave his actors a range of possibilities from which to select in developing their characters and their style of acting, encouraging them to investigate different options and potential interpretations. Thus, the Shakespearean actor was a ‘detective’, sifting his script for clues and ultimately reaching the most plausible solution via trial and error in rehearsal work. What strategies could he employ in this search? What further considerations did the physical context in which Elizabethan theatre was performed demand of or offer the actor – especially given the need to work together with the audience as a fellow-player and active member of the production?
And how can a present-day actor – or someone interested in exploring how an actor approaches a Shakespeare play – explore and utilise these strategies (especially in the light of how few stage directions such a script contains)? How can we exploit the very physical nature of Shakespeare’s language? How can we search the evidence to reveal the wealth of possibilities, and then zoom in on the solutions that will be most convincing for our audience? In short, how does a Shakespeare play shift from being ‘words on a page’ to a live event on the stage? What makes every performance a unique event, and how can we involve and work with our audience as an active participant in that performance?
This series of connected workshops will explore how a Shakespeare script is an ‘enabling’ medium, opening up multiple options, rather than a ‘restricting’ one pointing to only one possible interpretation. It will also demonstrate that Shakespeare’s language – when explored in practice, when spoken and given physical life – is nowhere as difficult as it seems when simply read on the page…!
Each session will use very active, hands-on experiment and experience, taking extracts from Shakespeare’s plays as our basis, assisted by a variety of ‘tools’ developed by Michael over 40 years of drama direction as well as from workshops at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. Be prepared to go where you have never gone before with Shakespeare, especially if your contact with his plays so far has been solely through the (admittedly fascinating) academic study of a literary text and/or watching Shakespeare on film – as Chorus expresses it in Henry V: “Let us … on your imaginary forces work…”
Note: We will be using some of the hours formally set aside for Self-Study in the module description as two full-day Saturday workshops. Details and dates will be set up in the first in-class session.
Questions? Drop Michael an email at mclaridg@uni-mainz.de
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