THR 407 - Advanced Acting: Advanced Shakespeare Workshop

Course unit(s): 1
Prerequisite(s): Any 300 level acting course.
Building upon techniques introduced in THR 350, this course affords the upper-level acting student opportunities to do advanced performance training with classical verse. Focusing primarily on Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, as well as on verse texts by other English Renaissance playwrights, the course aims to deepen the student’s psychophysical fluency with performing poetically intricate material. As with THR 350, the course is organized around addressing increasingly complex demands of heightened language, beginning with approaches to speeches and soliloquies, and continuing into work on advanced metrical variation, artifice, linguistic patterns/patterns of thought and action, and heightened musicality. The course also considers feats of editing and adapting classical verse material for performance, as well as artistic and political interpretive considerations related to the contemporary reclamation and re-staging of classical European texts.