by Kyle Smith
This semester has seen a number of special occasions – not to mention visitors – to our Shakespeare & Performance program.
The weekend of October 21 saw the Blackfriars Playhouse play host to a group of educators from throughout the Shenandoah Valley for a Shakespeare education workshop. The workshop focused on teaching Shakespeare through performance, while the faculty-moderated discussions also included thoughts on collaboration and the MFA company model. The workshop was made possible by a grant from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
“The Folger won an enormous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to send Folios to each state. And part of the larger funding remit for them was to have these micro-grants that were about teaching Shakespeare to the undergrad population,” S&P program director Dr. Paul Menzer said. “One of the offices managing the grant contacted me and said ‘Hey you guys should think about doing this’, and generally when someone says ‘You should apply for this grant!’ you should apply for the grant.”
Professor James Loehlin of the University of Texas at Austin was a guest speaker for the workshop. Loehlin is the director of Shakespeare at Winedale, a touring company that graced the Blackfriars stage before classes started this semester with a production of King John.
“I think, with a grant-based workshop, it’s important to bring expertise from the outside in,” Menzer said. “James is a friend, but we also wanted someone who works in similar ways, but in a different environment, who might ask questions that we might not be thinking about.”
“I have come to appreciate the value of pedagogy that takes the whole play as the unit of study, and the entire production process as its methodology,” Loehlin said. “Through the discussions we had over this weekend, I think all the participants developed an appreciation for both the challenges associated with this kind of teaching and the potentially great benefits. I am hopeful that many will begin experimenting with production-based teaching. Our conversations certainly sent me back to my own classes with renewed energy and new ideas.”
On November 5, noted new-historicist Richard Wilson gave a lecture at the Blackfriars on the surprising ties between British fascism and the theatre of the 1920s-’30s. Taken from his new book Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will, the talk, itself titled Wheel of Fire, took a close look at the fire that destroyed the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1926. Closely linked to the fire and its aftermath was A. K. Chesterton, the theatre’s publicist and cousin of theologian G. K. Chesterton. Wilson went into great detail describing how after the fire, Chesterton used his fascist connections (and his relation to its architect Elisabeth Scott) to build its replacement, which reopened in 1932. Chesterton would go on to found several right-wing groups opposed to the dissolution of the British Empire.
Kate Eastwood Norris, a longtime friend of the S&P program, visited from November 9-11 to teach two workshops: one on distinct physicality when portraying multiple characters, and one on clowning. Norris has previously taught an entire course devoted to clowning. Participants learned about the exaggerated movements of shaking hands, turning around, tripping and double-taking that serve as versatile tools in a clown’s repertoire.
Events like these will continue for the S&P program. Although they may not involve grants as the Folger workshop did, Menzer says that their value is in these events’ ability to build community.
“We do the Blackfriars conference every other fall, and that is an all-hands on deck, exhausting thing. I often felt like, in the off years, it’s good to have an event that generates these kinds of conversations,” Menzer said. “I can definitely imagine wanting to circle back in fall of ’18 and doing something like this again. The nice thing about it being local is that it’s not terribly expensive. It was fantastic to have that grant to make it even better.”
The next visitor of this semester will be a workshop with Leslie Reidel on Directing Shakespeare; it takes place in Masonic Blue on November 18 and 19.
