How To Watch: Shakespeare (a perfect introduction...)

I've been staging Shakespeare plays with middle school students for 16 years. I fell in love with Shakespeare in college and have spent my adult digging deeper and deeper into his work. My work with Shakespeare sparked my passion for language, etymology, metaphor, epistemology, religion, philosophy, semiotics, poetry and, of course, theatre.

Over the years, several of the students I've staged Shakespeare with have become great fans of his work. However, I encounter endless resistance when I'm teaching his plays. I'm currently developing several introductory tools in the hopes of improving access to the canon by contextualizing the plays in history and explaining the poetic tropes he used to write the plays.

To that end, I'd love to know how you feel about Shakespeare. Is your only memory of Shakespeare having to slog through MACBETH in 10th grade English? Imagine the perfect introduction to Shakespeare. What would it be like?

How To (Watch)/Death, a performance

After 4 weeks of in-depth exploration of acting, postdramatic theatre, physical theatre and death, our final project premiers in 5 days. HOW TO (WATCH)/DEATH at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center as part of the Summer Youth Performance Workshop's performance. How do you watch death?

Thursday, 30 July 2009, 7PM.

How To Watch: Death

Once we get this out of the way, we can move on to discussing the hard stuff.

Have you ever seen someone die? Did you watch? Did you turn away? Did it make your stomach knot up? Did you feel relief for them? For yourself? Where you selfish? Was it a surprise, the death? Did they look peaceful? Pained? Did it remind you of your own mortality? Was it scary? Did you see God? Did the dying person see God? Could you tell?

Was it morbid? Gross? Where you surprised by your reaction? Did it give you pause? Make you reflect on your own life?

Or, did you move beyond all the human cliches? Did you find a new...

I've been to funerals for both the old & young. I've never watched anyone die. I'm in no rush. It's likely I'll have to watch it at some point. But, maybe not.

The begining of an ongoing experiment & prison.

Over the past few years I've come to believe the performing artist gets far more from making the art than the audience does from watching it. This leads me to some questions. Is it the arts fault? The artists? The audience? Do we know how to watch the performing arts? There is a famous story of a production of GODOT at a prison in California. It is said that the inmates where deeply engaged and moved by the show. What tools did they have they I don't?

I once played Macduff in a production of MACBETH that was performed in a woman's prison. As Macbeth moved to kill me, the audience screamed in an effort to save me. It was the most dramatic reaction I'd ever heard from an audience.

Am I wrong? Have you had dramatic reactions to performance? How do you watch?