1. Intense Warm-Up
2. Commedia Work
3. Kim’s talk on Unrehearsed Shakespeare
Our first full class. Mick started by splitting up the PostGrads and the UnderGrads so he could lead the UnderGrads in his own warm-up and the PostGrads could do there own thing. A lot of people did stretching. While stretching is a fine warm-up it would have been much better to do more to get the blood flowing. Thankfully, our one true athlete, the other Adam, knows better and got us all sweating.
Mick then led the whole group through some Commedia style exercises paired with some Viewpoints-esque technique, getting us moving with different body shapes, leading with different parts of the body. This led wonderfully into an intro to Commedia Dell’Arte and the Lazzi. He took us through various Lazzi:
These stock characters present themselves all over Shakespeare’s works. See handout on Commedia.
Kim Carrell then led a presentation on the Unrehearsed Shakespeare technique. Working on theories of Patrick Turner and Tiffany Stearn, about the very limited rehearsal process that must have occurred in Elizabethan Theater. Basically, everything you need to know can be found in the First Folio Text. All the clues are in the text, which I agree with I’m just not sure that those are the only clues that one can/should use. Theater has evolved since Elizabethan times, why would you ignore that fact? I have no doubt that this “Original Staging” Practice work but I have yet to be convinced that it can work well or be compelling theater to watch.
But I am interested in learning more about it.
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