Shakespeare & Company: When Action is Eloquence / Edition 1

by Bella Merlin, Tina Packer

Overview

Shakespeare Company: When Action is Eloquence is the first comprehensive insight into this internationally acclaimed company founded in 1978 in Lenox, Massachusetts, by actor-director Tina Packer and voice pioneer Kristin Linklater, with the transformative power of Shakespeare’s language at its heart. Why act Shakespeare? What’s his relevance in the twenty-first century? Compelling answers to these questions lie at the center of this highly accessible journey into Shakespeare & Company’s aesthetics and practice. Drawing on hitherto unpublished material – including notebooks, lectures, interviews, rehearsal diaries – and the Company’s newly collated archive, this book provides insight into a working theatre company and sheds light on the role Shakespeare plays in our modern world. It also details: Shakespeare Company’s founding and early history, Its aesthetic based on the Elizabethan theatre’s principles of the Art of Rhetoric; Structure of the Verse; Voice and Movement; Clown; Fight; and Actor/Audience Relationship, Vocational components of its Training, Intensives, Practical pedagogy of its Educatio programs, Insights into its unique approaches to Performance, Impact and legacy of its three lifetime founding members: Dennis Krausnick (Director of Training), Kevin G. Coleman (Director of Education) and Tina Packer (founding artistic director). Actors, directors, students, educators, scholars and theatre-lovers alike will find practical acting strategies, inspirational approaches to theatre making and lively insights into the sustaining of a unique and robust theatre company that has been thriving for over 40 years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367262556
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/26/2020
Pages:	342
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bella Merlin is an actor, professor of acting at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of six books on acting, including The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit and Facing the Fear: An Actor’s Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright.

Tina Packer is the multi-award-winning founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company, and has acted and/or directed all of Shakespeare’s plays as well as touring her original take on Shakespeare’s women, Women of Will. Her book of the same name was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Table of Contents

List of figures ix

Foreword Allyn Burrows xi

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xvii

Abbreviations xix

Prologue: 'To unpath'd waters, undream'd shores' 1

Act I History and roots 7

1 Visions and revisions: The Company is formed 9

2 Bricks and mortar, trellis and trees: An aesthetic is realized 38

3 Talk #1: Function of the Theatre 63

Act II Training 81

4 Evolution and influences of the Month-Long Intensive 83

5 Talk #2: Actor/Audience Relationship 107

6 Voice Work and Basics 116

7 Text Work and Dropping In 132

8 Body Work and bringing it all together 148

Act III Education 169

9 Practical pedagogy 171

10 Shakespeare in the Schools 190

11 Shakespeare on the campus 209

12 Shakespeare in the Courts 223

Act IV Performance 237

13 The art form of performance 239

14 Talk #3: Theatre, Therapy and Theology 264

15 Cymbeline: A performance case study 274

Epilogue: 'On such a full sea are we now afloat' 296

Appendix 1 An abridged performance history 302

Appendix 2 An abridged dramatis personae 309

Appendix 3 A potted plot of Cymbeline 312

Index 314