Final Reflection

Photos top to bottom:

• Liz Slater with a grandmotherly kiss for Adetomiwa Edun - Romeo - in the Globe's production of Romeo and Juliet. Edun, an actor from Nigeria, plays a frenzied Romeo - authentic to his Nigerian roots.

• Traditional London "black cabs" deliver passengers to the Globe performances. The London taxis, like those in the US, are beginning to be "wrapped" to advertise commercial businesses.

• Annie, a teacher from Ohio, demonstrates the correct position for reading with both right and left brains. This exercise, along with crawling (left hand/right knee, right hand/left knee) helps dyslexia, autism, and general memorization. Two more tips for memorization: memorize by poetic line, not by thought; and sleep with the script under your pillow. It works! Remember, though, when it's time to perform to consider the "thought units."

• A final view of the Globe stage. Some believe that this space is sacred. Many actors who perform on this three sided stage to a fully lighted audience find it difficult to return to the flat stage in a darkened theater. If it's true that theater is based in relationship, then the Globe stage is indeed a space where our spirits are moved.

• The Gosden House School's performance of Othello marks the most memorable moments of the three week study. Those of us who have full movement of our limbs, those of us who have our eyesight and the gift of language, those of us who move each day without help and without pain -- remember these "few," these "happy few," this "band of brothers," these brave, special children at Gosden House School. With them as our model, we risk and we change - without complaint.

Final Performance

The first two pictures (top to bottom) show Romeo (Deidre - far left), the Friar (Steve - middle), and the Nurse (Liz - far right) performing Act III, scene iii, Romeo and Juliet.

The next picture is Romeo and the Nurse with one of the actors from the Globe's Troilus and Cressida watching the play from a groundling's position.

The last picture is the ensemble scene -- an adaptation of the four performed scenes -- Act III, scenes ii, iii, & v and Act IV, scenes i, iii, & v.

The ensemble scene was the result of Adam's 10 step process!

Note to students: We can cut scenes from any play and duplicate this practice.

Student Leaders: Obtain a copy of the Ten Step Process from Mrs. Slater and apply it to a scene.

Days 14 & 15 - The plays

Each of the above pictures is the stage for one of the plays that we saw. From top to bottom:

OTHELLO - at Gosden House School; ROMEO AND JULIET, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, and MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM -- all at the Globe Theatre.

Pictures are not permitted during performances at the Globe. Pictures may be taken as the groundlings enter the yard.

The MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM stage is a Globe traveling company. They set the play in the 1920s and had only eight people in their troupe. That show had plenty of 1920s type music. The consensus was that the show was fun! There were criticisms about the sexualizing of Puck. However, for a traveling show, with almost no time for practice and set up, they did a marvelous job.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA is one of Shakespeare's problem plays. Written around the same time as HAMLET, it wasn't performed until 1911 and probably not performed at The Globe. A private audience was most likely the first to see this play. Scholars are unsure whether it is a tragedy, a history, or a comedy. It has been played a great deal in the last few decades as a statement about war. I have read the play, listened to the play, and watched the play twice. This performance was the first time that I understood what was going on. This director cut more than 500 lines and added a few lines. It helped. The acting troupe was magnificent! Students might look at monologues from Cressida and Cassandra as well as the prologue and epilogue of this play.

The Gosden House performance, discussed on a previous blog, was staged at various locations around the luscious grounds. This picture was complete with a garden grown by the fourth grade students! The OTHELLO production was the most memorable moment of my time in London. Special needs students performing OTHELLO were no longer special needs students!

Day 13 - Dance

Shakespeare comedies always ended with a jig. The pipe and tabor provided the music for the dance.

Today, at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, every play ends with a jig!

Students interested in dance might research dance in the late Renaissance (c.1535-c.1620). The dancing highlight of this period was the galliard, a lively vigorous dance which could gain a gentleman a position at court. Queen Elizabeth was an accomplished dancer who learned the Italian manner of high dance; she was impatient with her Maids in Waiting who were less accomplished dancers. It was Catherine de'Medici who introduced the works of the Italian dancing master Caroso and Negri into France. Mary, Queen of Scots, the third notable female ruler of teh time, also played her part in introducing French, and possibly Italina, dance styles to Scotland.

Research:

1. Inns of Court -- their manuscripts confirm the importance of dance in Elizabethan England

2. John Playford's 1651 publication The English Dancing Master

3. Terms -- measures, almaines, Quadran Pavan, pavan-galliard

Day 12 - Music

"Look up to the stars; that's where harmony is."

Investigate who said this quote.

The above picture is a monocord. Investigate the history of this instrument (scientific tool). Investigate "Pythagorian harmony" and the relationship of music to mathematical proportions and numbers.

Musicians were paid for playing for plays and at court. Musicians had a lower status and were seen as being different than other people at court. In fact, the majority of musician in Henry VIII's court were immigrants, largely Jewish immigrants. Investigate ethnic differences in the plays: Islam in OTHELLO and Judaism in MERCHANT OF VENICE.

Note: The cow's horn became the corneto! Cornets were used in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE to signal the change of scene to Belmont.

Note: In Shakespeare's plays, music is often mentioned with discord: "Time broke in a disordered string." - RICHARD II

Research: References to music throughout the plays and sonnets

Keith McGowan, an Elizabethan musician brought many period instruments for examination. Look at the pictures and identify the instruments.

Day 12 - Stage Design and Costumes

Four Important Elements in Stage Design

• Materials
• Shape and Size
• Manner of construction
• Context (the idea)

In 1948, Jenny Tiramani's parents used paper to make costumes for a children's Shakespeare production. To date, Ms. Tiramani has worked with many famous actors, including Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench in the 1988 production of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. In 1993, she was part of the production of AS YOU LIKE IT at St. Clement's Church in New York City. In 2010, she begins work with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Research Jenny Tiramani to find out more about her work.

In the Globe production under Mark Rylance, Ms. Tiramani created Elizabethan and Jacobean costumes made from authentic period material; all the costumes were sewn by hand.

Notes: Clothing was so important, women would pin their clothing on rather than sew it, thus the term "pin money."

Men's legs were seen and shown off; women's legs were hidden. Investigate "The Order of the Garter."

Eighty percent of the characters in Shakespeare's play are gentlemen! Every actor would own a doublet, hose, a good cloak, and a few weapons. The acting company would have to purchase costumes for specific plays.

Research some aspect of costumes or props that were used in Shakespeare's plays.

Note: Interested students may adopt an actor at the Globe theater and follow costume and performance.

Days 10 & 11 Word & Sound!

The Words

Speaking is decorated silence!

Vowel sounds, which are open, indicate emotion; consonant sounds, which are stopped, indicate thought. Silence, solitude, and stillness lead to calm, commanding consciousness. Sound has to do with the emotional intelligence. Investigate how emotional intelligence differs from other intelligences.

Note: the oak that Peter McCurdy used to build the current Globe Theatre was 400 years old. The wood has the sound of the people who lived 400 years ago in this region -- frozen sound. The oak breathes still! In winter the sound is hard; in summer the sound is luxurious.

Sunday - St. Paul's Cathedral

St. Paul's Cathedral

The Sixth Sunday after Trinity

Sung Eucharist

Theresienmesse by Haydn

St. Paul's Cathedral Consort

with the City of London Sinfonia

St. Paul's is the Mother Church of the Diocese of London and worship has been offered on this site since AD 604. St. Paul's belongs to the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) made a significant contribution to almost every genre of music that was prevalent in his day, his style epitomising the charm and elegance of the Classical Period, while retaliating the musical integrity of Baroque invention and prefiguring the expressive characteristics of the Romantic Era.

The mass in B flat, or "Theresienmesse" (the Theresa Mass) is one of the six great masses composed between 1796 and 1802 in honor of Princess Maria Hermenegild, the wife of Haydn's patron Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy II.

Investigate other famous composers who wrote masses.

Day 9 - Gosden House School

This year the children from Gosden House School performed Othello. Note the strawberry on the tee shirts that the students created. Investigate the use of the strawberry in the play.

A school for special needs children - ages 5 through eighteen - has a partnership with The Globe. Each year the school children perform a Shakespeare play. (Last year they did the sonnets!) the performance is holistic and organic. The play takes over the curriculum: hoticulture, geography, history, music, art, mathmatics, writing, performing, staging, managing.... For the Gosden School students "The play's the thing!"

Day 8- Costumes and props

Ophelia wore this costume in HAMLET. Ophelia was from the wealthy class. She was unmarried. She could have worn her hair down. Married women must always keep their hair up. The wedding night would be the last time that a maid could "let her hair down." Women must always have a covering on their heads. This dress was considered casual -- like a tee shirt and jeans of today.

Cross-gartered hose! Women held their stockings up in this fashion. Investigate the term "cross-gartered" in Twelfth Night.

The wealthy upper class were allowed to wear scarlet, purple and silk. If you were not upper class and wore outlawed fabric, you would be imprisoned for six month and fined 1,0000 pounds. Investigate the law that imposed this penalty. Wealthy women wore corsets that laced in the back. Their servants laced them. (Notice the neat lacing: thus the phrase - "Straight laced!") Poorer women laced their own corsets in the front (Note the phrase - "loose women.")

The bum roll, the French farthingale, was the fashion for both wealthy and poor women.

Days 7 & 8 -- Thoughts Units & Verse vs Prose

Shakespeare has been translated into many languages. Investigate how many languages enjoy the bard

Thought Units

A monologue, a group of lines, a poem -- often contains more than one thought or feeling!

• Divide lines into thought units. (But it is often helpful to memorize by line not by thought!) A thought unit is what you want to say to make a thought. It has a certain tone. You know when you are coming to the end of it. Look

• In all speaking, we speak to push for the argument. Which is the word in the thought unit will advance my argument?

Verse

Iambic pentameter -- the beat, beat -- the sound of consciousness within our mother's womb; the first rhythm we all heard before we were born. It is a secret rhythm because the audience is not aware of it.

Marlowe and Kidd -- the first to used iambic pentameter. This rhythm was thought to be dangerous in Shakespeare's time; like today rap or heavy metal music might be considered dangerous for youth.

• 
  
  Breathe at the beginning of the lines, not at the end


• 
  
  Usually the last word of the line is what we are pushing to


• 
  
  Think of the sounds in the verse


• 
  
  Second half of the lines is always stronger than the first -- it's the point that you are going to


• 
  
  Usually "not" after the verb is not stressed -- exception: Iago - "I am not"


• 
  
  Half lines of verse usually mean something -- an action?

Note: early plays were written to end of line punctuation and end rhyme; in later plays there was enjambment, i.e. breathing in the middle of the line and punctuation in mid-line. It's about emphasis.

Prose

The starkness of prose does not capture the stuff of life! We might react to the rhythm of verse even if we had not words.

Prose is like a brainstorm -- the character must come up with something to change the situation on stage.

Typical characteristics of prose: self-centered way of speaking; lists; a front is being presented; language of wit; language of comedy; in prose a surprise is revealed.

• We are usually taught that verse = truth and prose = lies. This is too simply put! RATHER: verse = emotion (vulnerability) and prose = watchfullness (guaraded). In the prose something is hidden. Prose is more full of artifice. Prose is harder to play. Verse has a rhythm that satisfies us.
• As You Like It has more prose than verse. Most of the love scenes are in prose! Touchstone speaks in prose all the time. Investigate Audrey and Charles. Do they ever speak in verse?
• Loves Labours Lost is almost entirely prose.
• Twelfth Night is 60% prose
• Much Ado About Nothing is 75% prose

Investigate The merry Wives of Windsor -- what percentage of that play is prose?

Verse vs Prose in Shakespeare

• Seventy-five percent of the plays are in verse (10% of that is rhymed and 90% is blank verse); twenty-five percent are in prose.
• In prose characters are attempting to suppress an emotion. In prose we are invited to look behind what they are saying.
• Prose runs faster - more unrhymed syllables
• Prose comes from the head; iambic pentameter verse is the beat of the heart
• Verse is like being; prose is like acting
• Rhymed verse and prose have more in common than blank verse; rhymed verse softens the thought but there is a cleverness or self-awareness in the rhyme.

Day 6: The Globe Stage

Enter the Globe stage through this door.

On stage! View from the center door

Look up to the heavens! Watch the text of the plays. When the actors refer to the "heavens," they mean God's Heaven (the actual sky) as well as the Globe's "heavens" - the painting above the stage closest to the center door.



The Globe's Heavens!
Research which Shakespeare' s plays would use the opening in the heavens.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Southwark Cathedral

July 12, 2009 Archbishop Desmond Tutu presided over the Choral Eucharisitc celebration at Southwark Cathedral. Eight hundred years old, Southwark Cathedral is the church where St. Thomas a Becket was baptized.

• Research Archbishop Tutu's history and his relationship to the London Cathedral.
• Identify a famous piece of British literature which opens in Southwark Cathedral.
  
  

The Rose Theatre

The actual site of The Rose: the inside red circle indicates the original stage.

Investigate the story of The Rose's excavation in the 1980s. Which famous actors and English gentry chained themselves to the ruins in an attempt to stop the city of London from demolishing the site of London's oldest theater?

The Rose was Christopher Marlowe's theater.

Four theaters housed plays in Southbank during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: The Rose, The Swan, The Hope, and The Globe. They were all located in an area that is no more than two city blocks. When Shakespeare's Globe was built and Marlowe was murdered, The Rose, managed by John Heminges, lost business and was forced to close. Investigate Marlowe's murder. Which theater had bear baiting as well as plays? Queen Elizabeth I generally did not go to theaters; she did go to bear baiting.

Days 4 & 5 Archetypes and Elements

The Globe Theatre - filling for a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream

Pictures are permitted before performances as the audience gathers; no pictures or video once the show begin. Groundlings may sit until the play begins; then they must stand for the entire play.

Theater is about relationships.

1. We are learning about the circles within ourselves: earth, water, fire, air. We have learned a Sufi exercise [Explore the poet/philosopher Rumi.] that produces an awareness of the four elements within ourselves:
•Earth – flesh, weight, everything we can touch
•Water – blood, sweat, and tears; fluid
•Fire – nervous system, passion, spark
•Air – vascular system; every cell has air around it; the ethereal in us.*
[*The first breath we take (birth) is a breath of inspiration. Within 10 seconds of birth we take a breath "in," a hole in the heart closes, and we begin to live. The last breath we take (death) is a breath of expiration; we exhaust the last bit of air in our bodies: we expire - we die. The first breath of life and the last breath of live are the only breaths that we make a decision to take. All other breaths are a gift! There’s no need for me to be in charge; the breathing just happens naturally. Perhaps theater is the study of breath.]

This physical exercise is thousands of years old: gentle, demanding, whole.


2. We are learning about our relationship with other characters of the stage:
•The archetype activities – sovereign, warrior, lover (white knuckled holding in, explodes to open- armed love), and jester (wizard). Each Jungian archetype has its shadow – tyrant; murderer; needy, overbearing "smotherer," evil trickster (Iago). We have done many activities with the archetypes!
•Importance of balance: We played an improve game where we were on a saucer and had to move so that that saucer would stay balanced and not break.
[All of the activities translate to high school as well as to the little children who come for workshops.]


3. The Globe’s stage produces a third relationship - between the players and the audience: “We are a company of friends dependent upon the kindness of strangers.” The actors have a close physical and emotional relationship with the audience. With the Globe’s stage there is no dark theater, no people sitting in rows of seats waiting for a curtain to open and then watching the play in silence. At the Globe, people enter and leave the theater during the performance; some stand (groundlings); some sit (all close together). The audience calls out with passion at different moments. There is no darkness: plays are performed during the day or (as evening approaches) lights illuminate the entire audience and stage to simulate daylight.
____________

Days 2 and 3: Jungian Archetypes & Globe History

Pictured below: Groups of students learning about the history of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.

Jungian Archetypes

There are four major archetypes used in Shakespeare's plays:

The Sovereign

The Warrior

The Caregiver (or Lover)

The Jester (or Wizard/Magician)

Of course, we immediately think of specific characters:

Henry V - Sovereign

Mark Antony - Warrior

Orlando - Lover

Prospero - Wizard

What is worth thinking about is that we can look at a character and see more than one archetype in the character:

The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet is a caregiver who often looks like the joker. In which scene does the Nurse take on the sovereign archetype?

Henry V is a sovereign and a warrior and a lover in Shakespeare's Henry V. Can you think of a time in the play when he takes on the jester archetype?

Use the Jungian archetypes to analyze the multi-levels in a character. The archetypes can also be used with the elementary school children within an improv experience:

The sovereign is straight and carries himself with the weight of authority upon his shoulders. He moves regally with a crown on his head.

The warrior is a fierce protector - unafraid. He moves quickly and efficiently with a sword and a shield.

The caregiver open for life experiences; he enjoys people. He moves with arms wide out when he meets people or enters the world.

The jester is a trickster; he is not what he seems to be. He dodges and twirls around when he encounters people.

The children take turns assuming the character of each archetype as they move within the stage area and encounter one another. They must maintain character - aware of body and metaphoric stances. Then give a line to be said . Every student gets the same line but must say the line in archetype-character. Body, Language, Movement

___________________________

Southbank: the home of the Globe Theatre

In the early seventeenth century, Bankside - south of London proper - was not part of London as it is today. It was riddled with crime, poverty, and illiteracy. When Richard Burbage lost the lease to London's first indoor theater - THE THEATRE - Shakespeare and company went across the Thames and stole the lumber to build his theater - THE GLOBE.

How they got the lumber across the river seems unclear. Some say the Thames River froze and men carried the wood across the "not too wide, frozen" Thames.

Today, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre still plays to sold out audiences!

Day 1: Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance

The course of study for us teachers is three part: the study of theater, the study of performance, and education (reflection on how our performance translates to the classroom). Our first session has been the history of Shakespeare's Globe in Southwark as well as the history of the original theater.

Contrary to what most English teachers tell their students, the groundlings probably did not throw fruit and vegetables at the actors: the costumes were too elaborate and costly to allow that; and the audience members who paid a penny were too poor to waste food. Note: the groundlings were so called because they stood on the ground to watch the play, also because of a German word for a fish that keeps it mouth open. These penny-paying theater goers must have looked like open-mouthed fish as they reacted with shock, wonder, and laughter to the performance.

The theater looks older to me. I was here in 1998 and again in 1999. Of course, even though the oak looks older, oak gets stronger as it ages (so we are told by the guide) - so only the thatch roof need to be changed every ten years. This building is the only building in London that has a thatch roof. (In Shakespeare's Day, many such roofs existed.) The first Globe was destroyed because a misfired cannon spark hit the thatch roof instead of aiming for the Thames River.

This photo views the Thames River from the Globe's steps. St. Paul's Cathedral is seen just across the river.