San Diego Junior Theatre

Grades 7-12

Welcome to the new JT studio, a series of intensive programs geared towards students looking for advanced training. Ideal for students pursuing musical theatre at a high level, this course builds the confidence, technique, and artistry needed to shine in both solo and collaborative settings.

Approaching Shakespeare as we do - as actors interpreting his work four centuries after the plays were performed, we inevitably tend to focus on the language -  on giving life to his soaring rhetoric and expansive thinking.  However, the theater of Shakespeare's day which he both embraced and reinvented was largely one of physical spectacle.  In all of his plays, intellectual and spiritual reflection is made more vivid by contrasting it against scenes of broad physical comedy, grand buffoonery, and antic folly on the part of the rustics, clowns and fools.   In many of Shakespeare's comedies these elements of inversion and anarchy become dominant.  These plays draw upon performance traditions such as Commedia Dell’arte, Morality plays, and even Elizabethan holiday pageants -  all forms which delight in physical exuberance and fully embodied characterization.    The class will focus on engaging the stock character physical forms of Commedia Dell’arte and applying them to characterization in Shakespeare's plays where the influence of Commedia is at the forefront.  Students will also learn to play within and exploit the unique actor-audience relationship that many of his comedies revel in.   Drawing upon material from The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, students will learn an approach to Shakespearean comedy that is expansive, extempore, and flirts with a kind of sublime anarchy that can liberate and enliven Shakespeare's work, as well as the actor performing it.