Shakespeare & Company: When Action is Eloquence from Focal Press 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Drawing on hitherto unpublished material—including notebooks, lectures, interviews, rehearsal diaries—and the Company's newly collated archive, this book provides insight into a working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.
Foreword - Allyn Burrows
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Prologue
ACT I: HISTORY AND ROOTS
1. Visions and Revisions: The Company is Formed
2. Bricks and Mortar, Trellis and Trees: An Aesthetic is Realized
3. Talk #1: Function of the Theatre
ACT II: TRAINING
4. Evolution and Influences of the Month-Long Intensive
5. Talk #2: Actor/Audience Relationship
6. Voice Work & Basics
7. Text Work & Dropping In
8. Body Work & Bringing It All Together
ACT III: EDUCATION
9. Practical Pedagogy
10. Shakespeare in the Schools
11. Shakespeare on the Campus
12. Shakespeare in the Courts
ACT IV: PERFORMANCE
13. The Art Form of Performance
14. Talk #3: Theatre, Therapy, and Theology
15. Cymbeline: A Performance Case Study Epilogue: 'On such a full sea are we now afloat'
Appendix 1: An Abridged Performance History
Appendix 2: An Abridged Dramatis Personae
Appendix 3: A Potted Plot of Cymbeline
Index
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.