A five-day series with three practitioners from the world-renowned Royal Shakespeare Company. Never fear Shakespeare again as you learn how to navigate his text in a fun, active way using techniques and learning the skills that focus on the use of your voice, body and mind to tell stories, and own text.
Day 1: Monday, 16th November
Uncovering Shakespeare’s Physical Key! ‘Just know it’s there!’
with Michael Corbidge
Join Michael Corbidge, Senior Associate Company Voice and Text Coach at the RSC, for fun-filled workshop. Whether you are a Shakespeare buff or simply want to discover the joys of text and character, or are an actor looking to delve deeper, this workshop will have plenty to offer you. An opportunity to ‘buff and shine’, it includes tried and tested ways of performing Shakespeare. Experience an immediate and visceral connection to Shakespeare’s text and a chance to let the words live in space un-hindered by expectations.
Michael has created a toolbox and practical key-kit to build confidence with text, voice, physicality, and character and aid in the quest for sense and emotional logic. We shall be chomping our way through one of Shakespeare’s best-loved works!
Join Michael Corbidge, Senior Associate Company Voice and Text Coach at the RSC, for a fun-filled workshop assisted by a toolbox and key-kit he has designed. Whether you are a Shakespeare buff or simply want to discover the joys of text and character, or are an actor looking to delve deeper, this workshop will have plenty to offer you. We shall be chomping our way through one of Shakespeare’s best-loved works!
Day 2: Tuesday, 17th November
Sonic Sonnet
with Michael Corbidge
During two blissful hours of exploring one of Shakespeare’s ‘love’ sonnets, Michael will lead you into a world of exquisite sound, colour, and textures. He will guide you to all the clues on the page, equip you with detection knowledge and you will become the super-sleuth of text analysis before you know it! There’s something to suit everyone in this workshop on text investigation like no other whether you are young and curious, an emerging professional, teacher, or jobbing actor. Anyone!
With Michael’s usual trademark visceral connection to sound and his infectious ways of getting folk connected to right brain activity, join a text session you will never forget!
During two hours of exploring one of Shakespeare’s ‘love’ sonnets, Michael will lead you into a world of exquisite sound, colour, and textures. He will guide you to the clues on the page, equip you with detection knowledge and you will become the Marple/Holmes of text analysis before you know it! There’s something to suit everyone in this workshop whether you are young and curious, an emerging professional, teacher, or jobbing actor. Anyone!
Day 3: Wednesday, 18th November
Shakespeare: Some Fundamentals
with Cathleen McCarron
This lively, practical, text-based workshop will delve into Shakespeare’s extraordinary language and equip you with tools to investigate it, connect to it and speak it with passion and confidence. Shakespeare can seem daunting and impenetrable at first, but you will discover how practical games and exercises in key areas such as thought, imagery and verse can begin to break down the text, demystify the process and reveal meaning, emotion and character. No previous experience or knowledge of acting Shakespeare is necessary – everything you need to know will be there on the page!
This lively, practical, text-based workshop will delve into Shakespeare’s extraordinary language and equip you with tools to investigate it, connect to it and speak it with passion and confidence. Shakespeare can seem daunting at first, but you will discover how practical games and exercises can begin to demystify things. No previous experience or knowledge of acting Shakespeare is necessary – everything you need to know will be there on the page!
Day 4: Thursday, 19th November
Shakespeare: How to win an argument and get what you want
with Cathleen McCarron
Shakespeare’s elaborate language can sometimes seem overly poetic and “flowery” to our 21st-century sensibilities. In fact, in Shakespeare, language is action: characters speak in pursuit of their objectives and use any number of linguistic strategies to achieve them. Shakespeare was trained in Rhetoric – the art of using language to persuade – and deployed it to great effect in his plays, utilising rhetorical techniques such as antithesis (opposites), lists and repetition to enable his characters to entice, coerce and insist. In this fun and practical workshop, you will explore Shakespeare’s persuasive tactics and discover how to speak his text with precision and intention. No previous experience or knowledge of acting Shakespeare is necessary – everything you need to know will be there on the page!
Shakespeare’s elaborate language can sometimes seem overly poetic and “flowery” to our 21st-century sensibilities. In fact, in Shakespeare, language is action: characters speak in pursuit of their objectives and use linguistic strategies to achieve them. In this workshop, you will explore Shakespeare’s persuasive tactics and discover how to speak his text with precision and intention. No previous experience of acting Shakespeare is necessary – everything you need to know will be there on the page!
The Royal Shakespeare Company is making a virtual visit to the NCPA to ensure the Bard never daunts you again. With experts demystifying the language and text, all that remains is to embrace the works of the great dramatist!
Day 5: Friday, 20th November
Movement workshop for Shakespeare with Lucy Cullingford
If you caught a show of The Mirror Crack’d at the NCPA earlier this year, you would know the role movement played in its aesthetics and carrying the plot forward. This session will open with exercises for students to build an actor’s warm-up, enabling the body to work from a strong centre, while maintaining focus on release, alignment and connection with breath. The idea is to open the actor’s sensibility to the epic and three-dimensional theatre space, weight and time, exploring how a physical understanding of all three can be a useful toolkit for building a character. The workshop will also explore the eight efforts of action drive, aligning with Rudolph Laban’s theories of the body, human movement and behaviour.
The workshop will open with exercises for students to build an actor’s warm-up, enabling the body to work from a strong centre, while maintaining focus on release, alignment and connection with breath. We will look at space, weight and time, exploring how a physical understanding of all three can help actors build a character. The session will then go on to explore Rudolph Laban’s theories of the body, human movement and behaviour.
From Elizabethan-era courtesies to using movement to establish power dynamics, Lucy Cullingford is here to tell you why even the slightest gesture has a purpose on stage.
Limited seats: 30