walkingonthemoon

Introduction

This song and these lyrics kept playing in my head while I spent eight days this summer, walking on the moon. The Shakespeare Bootcamp was an idea that had been spinning in my head to do for years. What a pleasure it was to find other people who felt the same.

The Shakespeare Bootcamp At The New Perspectives Theatre Company

Shakespeare In The Schools

Teaching Shakespeare in the schools especially to younger grades is not as daunting as was once thought. Today, there are a veritable cattle call of websites and other resources like video that help the process along to understanding and application. Indeed, from an information processing perspective we understand the need to present material to youngsters in the gestalt form first; the top down method. Obviously there are other methods but with the barriers of the archaic language in Shakespeare, showing the film first will provide direct access to its meaning because as we know, 80% of communication is visual. I always use the example of my own experience of how I learned how to ski. What a mess. I was constantly doing head-plants into the nearest available snow bank or constantly catching an edge and leaving a trail of X’s of my form all the way down the mountain. I would have been a great addition to the Donner party as a literal trail marker for truly, X does indeed mark the spot. What made it all the more maddening was while I pulled myself up to my feet and brushed the snow out of my teeth some little rugrat would schuss by me happy as a clam. “Well there’s something to be learned here,” I shivered. What was it? It was pretty simple. Children see the whole movement by that I mean that they see the gestalt. Adults, and in my case, older students, (I was 13 when I learned to ski), see and understand the concept of skiing as a checklist instead of one continuous movement: Now the main critique that I have of the article is that although she speaks of using video as an introductory resource, there is nothing else she mentions with regards to technique. What else can one do besides planting the kids in front of the television set? How do we apply this and add more to the experience of Shakespeare in the classroom? In the acting profession, the Meisner technique speaks about the use of physical memory, which is a nice way of saying schema and automaticity gained through repetition or rather, rehearsal. Using a combination of video and actively getting the kids on their feet with the text increases comprehension by literally getting the words into theirs by allowing them to cue an action with a phrase forcing automaticity.

Examples of Elizabethan Acting Techniques and Cue Scripts

The Elizabethan actors who first performed the plays of Shakespeare worked a very heavy schedule, usually presenting six different full-length plays every week – and introducing a new play into the repertoire at two weekly intervals. There was no director in the modern sense, and often the actor has no access to the complete script of the play but was only given his cue script – that is, all the speeches that his character spoke, with just a few words at the start of the speech – his cue words. Research shows that this weight of work, there was no time for rehearsal in the sense that we understand the word today, and that the actors must have had a quick and reliable way of approaching a text that allowed them to perform as quickly as we know they did. It seems evident then that they worked from Shakespeare’s text the way an orchestral musician works from a score – they too are not given the complete work, but are given their own notes, and they work from the clues in the music – not just the notes but the notations and added instructions in the scoring. William Shakespeare, an actor himself, would know better than anyone the problems of working to such a tight schedule, and I am certain that he wrote into the speech all of the information that modern actors think they need to get from rehearsal – information on mood, attitude and character. And with the use of cue scripts in the classroom, students begin to actively understand the structure and the use of language and grammar.