(NOTE: Audrey Stanley mailed the following assignment to institute members during the summer. The September minutes follow the assignment.) NEH 1995-96 INSTITUTE SHAKESPEARE EXAMINED THROUGH PERFORMANCE PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR INTERNET E-MAIL, ADDRESS, TELEPHONE, AND FAX NUMBER ON YOUR SUBMISSIONS. Greetings to all from Audrey Stanley. ADD: Cowell College, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. TEL: (408) 458-3622. FAX: (408) 459-4880. Here is the preparation work for our first session in September. You will come to Washington having learned several passages from Macbeth, a play we will be working on for more than one session. The line numbers in the assignments that follow are from the New Folger paperback editions. Use the following exercises to: Prepare and learn both roles in Macbeth II.ii. Prepare and learn either Macbeth's soliloquy II.i.44-end or Lady Macbeth's two soliloquies I.v.15-33, 45-66. N.B. I am not proposing to load you up with this amount of preparation again. I just wanted us to get a head-start for our first session, particularly as we shall be seeing a production. However simplistic some of the work may feel to you, it can lead to some interesting discoveries about the scenes and the characters, and it begins to open out the actor's physicalization of the language. PART I 1. After consulting the enclosed Folio script for spelling and punctuation, make a simple scansion of the lines, discussing in note form any problematic lines. 2. Make brief notes on the primary l6th/17th century meanings of the words, consulting the OED, etc., checking even those words that do not seem to have changed their meaning. 3. Paraphrase the speeches into modern English, to cover the lull meaning. Make a brief summary of your discoveries and questions. CIRCULATE the summary to ALL of us in the group by AUGUST 15. Send a copy of Part 1, 1-3 to me by AUGUST 15. PART II 1. Keep a brief journal of the following work and your discoveries in note form, and bring this to Washington. 2. Begin the physicalization of the words in this way: a) Lie down on your back and relax, and check on the rhythm of your breathing. b) Sing out a breath on a low-pitched note as AHHHHHHH, then breathe normally. Now alternate these two about 6 times. c) Take each word in your first speech separately and explore the separate sounds in the word as if tasting or relishing them. Then put the sounds together to form the complete word. Then move on to the second word, taking a moment to relax and breathe between the words. Then the third word, etc. (This is slow work, but persevere. You might limit yourself to 6-10 lines at a session--or whatever feels comfortable.) d) Immediately write down in note form in your journal any discoveries you make about the thought, the character, his/her motives/feelings, the language, etc. 3. Speak the 6-10 lines out loud, concentrating on the meaning. 4. Xerox a copy of the whole scene, and mark those words you wish to stress in each line. (Keep stresses to as few words as possible--say one or two to a line, and beware of too many personal pronouns.) 5. Mark the assonances and alliterations with different colors. Any onomatopoeia? Write down any discoveries. 6. Circle the antitheses. 7. Differentiate or mark in some way figures of speech and imagery, and add your own comments on these. CIRCULATE to all of us a summary of your more interesting discoveries by AUGUST 30 or earlier, and bring your annotated Xerox copy to Washington. Send a copy of Part II, 4-7 to me by AUGUST 30. PART III Learn your roles (soliloquy and dialogue) for our first session at the Folger. Try learning the lines in this way: 1. Walk with the first thought, turn and walk in a new direction with the change from the first thought, making variously shaped triangles or squares with your walking. Very often the caesura will show where the thought changes, and you can use this exercise to discover the caesuras or lack of them within the line. Immediately note down any discoveries this brings to the understanding of the scene or the characters. 2. In a larger space, take each speech and walk out the major thought structures in bolder fashion, using different geometric shapes. Find out particularly where there is a complete change of thought, and check this with the Folio punctuation. Note down any discoveries. 3. Mark a Xerox copy with the Folio punctuation in red. Speak the speech lying on your back, breathing on the Folio punctuation as follows: a) take a short breath on a comma, b) take a longer breath on the colon or semi-colon, c) and finally a large breath on a period. Walk about the room speaking the speeches with this breathing. Note down any discoveries or changes in your journals, and bring them to our first session on SEPTEMBER 29. PART IV FINALLY--find paintings or illustrations or reproductions or just faces (from a painting/newspaper/magazine/ etc.) OR MAKE A COLLAGE that represents the visual appearances of your characters, bath external and internal. BRING THESE TO WASHINGTON together with a favorite OBJECT each of them might have. If anyone is feeling really creative, find a modern outfit or outfits that one of your characters might wear and bring it to our first session. PART V I. Look at 1 Henry IV II.iv.338-524 and III.ii.126-166. 2. Bring portable texts of Macbeth and 1 Henry IV with you to the session on SEPTEMBER 29. SURVIVE! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes and Reflections 29-30 September 1995 by Kurt Daw Friday, September 29 The already opened doors and beautifully prepared light breakfast were visible symbols of the welcoming nature of the Folger when I arrived my typically overly-anxious-few-minutes-early for the 8:45 gathering in the theater lobby for our first session. I had an opportunity to say "hello" to a few old friends and previous acquaintances, but concentrated on trying to put new faces with biographies which had been so thoughtfully previously supplied. That Audrey's advanced work had obviously already influenced us was brought home to me when one of the group members said to me, "You're the easy one to remember with all that rhyme and alliteration, you know, Kurt Daw from Kennesaw..." I laughed, and for me, the ice was broken. The process continued in a much more formal way when we gathered in the circle of chairs on the stage of the beloved Fortune replica. After a brief discussion about the speaking order Lena Cowen Orlin took the floor to introduce the Folger staff and remind us of the somewhat idiosyncratic rules of the Library. We were all duly instilled with a fear of ink-pens, open windows, and coke machines. Audrey Stanley and Alan Dessen then took turns introducing themselves and the program for the year. Alan, who claims that he only has two pedagogical stories, amused us with both of them and thereby quietly reminded us that this is a pedagogically-based institute. Audrey hinted of things to come by casually invoking phrases like "boot camp" and "rolling about of the floor." Soon we got the opportunity to introduce ourselves, along with a discovery from our previous work. I found myself sitting next to Sheila Cavanagh, who lives and works less than a half-an-hour away from me, but whom I'd never met. This set me to musing about why I am so grateful to be in the group. On a day-to-day basis I find little time to do all those things that I once thought would be my academic life. Casual conversations in graceful faculty clubs don't exist on my campus anymore, or much of anywhere from what I gather. This seminar, however, already allowed me to meet other scholars (like Paul, whose articles I have faithfully read without thinking that I would sometime discuss them with him in person) and to interact with them about substance instead of academic policy. How nice to be in a room with fifteen teachers for something other than a committee meeting. My recollection is that most of us were fairly general about our "discoveries," playing it safe in the first round, except for Eric who I recall as committing himself to the Folio capitalization. Nonetheless we were a talkative group, and the dynamics began to take shape. Having shot my mouth off and volunteered to do minutes, I find my memory breaking down at this point, so I am taking the printed schedule as gospel and assuming we did take our first break at this point. (We probably ought to go ahead and set the schedule for reporters for the year, by the way, as this is easier to do when you know in advance that you will be reporting. You can plan ahead for note-taking, recording, etc.) On return from break the chairs were being cleared away from the stage and it was time to begin the real stuff. Luckily that began with something I could handle--pulling on my toes and massaging my feet. We worked our way up the body kneading (with an audible "k") our tight muscles. Audrey referenced this as Litz Pisk work. I recall the discussion that the book (The Actor and His Body) is out of print, so I was happy to see it is listed in the latest Routledge catalogue in a Theatre Arts Books reprint. Soon we were lying on our backs on the floor, and then curling up our spines on counts of twenty. Shortly thereafter we were practicing stage falls from sitting, kneeling, and finally standing positions. At the end we were stage falling from our full height to the floor where we were rolling around and kicking our legs in the air. I doubt that the childish release was the point, but I liked it anyway. The next step, as far as my hazy memory can recover, was descending down into the dressing rooms which according to Lena we are to forget even exist to sit in front of the mirrors with bone props (well, really cut down coffee stirrers) holding our mouths open while we attempted to articulate a couple of pages of sound groups. Audrey reminded us that our students often fear and dislike Shakespeare because they are unaware of the tongue and lip energy needed to create that gorgeous language aloud. These simple exercises got us moving our articulators. (Julia Matthews has amusing anecdotes to tell of being a first year conservatory student carrying a cork around on a string to accomplish this same task.) This work is described in greater detail in Voice and the Actor by the great RSC voice coach Cecily Berry, which Audrey referred us to for further information. Upon ascending back to areas which we are allowed to know about, we completed the work with a further set of exercises designed to help us energize the words. Swinging our arms from positions over our heads until our knuckles nearly (or occasionally really) hit the floor, we would "whoosh" out a line or a few words. Full, powerful voices were beginning to be heard. My mild mannered partner, Cezarija, was suddenly transformed into a vocal superwoman. The volume and clarity of her new voice was surprising and beautiful. Soon after (Oh, why is this all so hazy?) we dismissed for lunch. One group went out into the Shakespeare herb garden, but I stayed with the group in the exhibition hall. Our lunch conversation ran the gamut, but did cover at least a bit of substantive territory when we discussed some of the previously submitted writings we had sent to one another. It was my own observation that I think we came to vastly different scansion decisions, in part because I think we have various formalized and improvised systems for scanning lines and different understandings of the purpose of doing scansion at all. (My own reference for this is a lovely little book called Shakespeare Aloud, which is small and cheap enough for me to require for my students as a supplement to their Riverside. My voice teacher friends, however, tend to favor Shakespeare Sounded Soundly.) Ellen emerged in this conversation as having metrical expertise, which I look forward to discussing further with her. Our discussion was involved enough that we realized we had engrossed Alan for fifteen extra minutes, so we hurriedly cleaned up and regathered. This session was led by Alan, and was the most cogent and insightful discussion of primary texts I have heard. Alan carefully traced the situation of not having any manuscripts in Shakespeare's hand, the no longer "bad" but just "short" quartos, the longer quartos which as best as I can tell are still "good," and the folio. I found particularly provocative Alan's rhetorical question, "Which would you rather have--a manuscript in Shakespeare's hand or an official promptbook from the first performance?" Both his teaching style and his sly sense of humor were revealed in his stated preference for a video tape of the third performance. Alan's handout had numerous examples of editorial challenges ranging from puzzling misprints to edition-specific stage directions. Somehow our discussion of Folio purism got us incongruously to "pood pastures" where we all sensed we had better stop. The very civilized custom of afternoon tea followed, and then we wandered off with Lena for reader registration and for a tour of the library. Along with learning the ins-and-outs of the system for getting in and out, we got to see almost the complete facility itself. Readers who want to tour the vaults (which are too small for the whole group) are encouraged to identify themselves to Lena, who will arrange for us (notice how I got my claim in immediately) to go in smaller units. Many folks also lingered over the pieces in the art collection. Perhaps we can talk the Institute staff into having a curator take us on an art tour at some point. When we arrived back at the Elizabethan Theater Audrey was on stage with a wicked grin on her face. She had new exercises in mind. In these, we paired off with a partner to run lines for the scene. Pressure was kept low, which I appreciated, by being told initially that this was just someone to work lines with, not necessarily our final partner. We ran through the speeches, and then got to our feet. We all turned out to be capable of walking and talking simultaneously, including Tom who was quite good at it despite having earlier denied the possibility. We did some very interesting work where the speaker advanced on a retreating partner, which made the idea of actively pursuing contact with a partner clearer to me. The most interesting, if exhausting, work of the afternoon was a very powerful exercise where one pair of actors restrained another speaking (shouting?) pair who were attempting to get past them. Ed proved to be even stronger than he looks, as I tried unsuccessfully to run over him. When we reversed our situation, I could barely control him, a hint of the enthralling physicality that he would bring to the performance the next day. At the time what seemed obvious to me was the benefit of such energetic commitment to the text. Julia commented to me that she very much appreciates the way Audrey keeps the intellectual, physical and emotional strands all running at once. This is where I really got that clearest. Later I also realized that this is the point at which textual meaning really began to be worked out collaboratively. The search for textual meaning in a pair was fascinating, but so was the contribution of a second pair, whose physical interactions and reactions began to shape what we were becoming. The end point was a brief bit of rehearsal wherever we could grab space about the room. My partner and I started improvising some "stuff" in a corner, where Audrey insisted some interesting things were happening and urged us to keep to the space. I liked it that Audrey was clear we were not "staging" our scenes, but exploring them. I felt freed from a directorial perspective and really enjoyed the time. My partner, Clare, was a courageous rehearser, and a generous collaborator. I took it as a sign of the Folger's excellent selection process, and Audrey's superb guidance, that we could all begin working so well and quickly with virtual strangers. Exciting ideas were clearly being tested all over the room. I loved the rehearsal process, but badly in need of a shower, I was grateful for dinner break and time to slip away and think about it all. I missed the dinner conversation, which later report has it, was lively. When we regathered after dinner we were in the Board Room. Rebecca had thoughtfully brought goodies and several pitchers of ice water appeared. Alan had a great pre-prepared tape of six Macbeth banquet scenes in a row. These ran from the sublime to the ridiculous in my opinion, but all were valuable for thinking about the scene. We discussed the pedagogical implications of showing so many scenes in a later session, but at the time I thought the focus was on our own experience in viewing, not necessarily modeling a classroom exercise. From this perspective it was an interesting and valuable evening with the individual expertise of our membership beginning to shine. Bill, who seems to have a videographic equivalent of a photographic memory for Shakespeare scenes on celluloid, particularly stood out. Audrey "pinched" my candy corn, a few kernels of popcorn were flying in the corner, but basically we were well behaved. We broke up early by Folger seminar standards, with a couple of questions in hand. We were to write no more than a page on one of the questions. (A couple of us later found a way to write a page covering both of the questions, but such transgressions are to be expected from a group of bright academic overachievers...) A few folks threatened to get in some evening rehearsal, but I think everyone eventually just got some rest and wrote. Saturday, September 30 Our second day dawned with another coffee/tea/breakfast. I hesitate to guess how early the staff has to arrive to get brewed coffee ready for us, but their graciousness is much appreciated regardless of how it was accomplished. I recognized that papers were being quietly collected all around me, and only wished it was so easy in my own classroom. There were a few interesting exchanges going on in my area where people were showing photographs that they had collected for their collage. Some of these were quite stunning. When we moved to the theater we repeated a bit of Litz Pisking, and then started into Linklater work. We massaged each other's spines and rolled our way up and down them. Lying on the floor with our eyes closed we began to explore the skeleton, and our breath. We dropped in breath, made tiny "Fs, huhs, huh-humms," and finally words. (This work is from Freeing the Natural Voice.) Half an hour later or so, we were on our feet and speaking to fill the space. Many nice resonant voices were emerging from well relaxed bodies. It is hard to image that keeping a pace like that of this weekend could be relaxing, but I certainly found that all my stored muscle tension was melting away. I don't think I have actually thought about being nice to my body since I began school this year, so this was most welcome work for me. Speaking the monologue across the expanse of the room in a whispered voice reinforced the deep desire to communicate. Pairing off we then dragged a partner who was restraining us toward a wall. I worked with Bob, who managed to challenge a whole different set of muscles in me than Ed had the day before. Now I hurt all over, including a few places (like mysterious Folger spaces) that I didn't remember I had. Getting ourselves to a wall we leaned at an incline, supported only by the back of our heads. We again spoke our monologues to the general space. I had a good deal of trouble holding on to my concentration in all that hub-bub, which I gather is part of the idea. I found myself chanting my Macbeth lines in unison with people across the theater from me, and doing my best to block out Lady Macbeths nearby. In what I thought was the best pedagogical technique of the weekend we started walking about the room simultaneously reciting our soliloquies. On Audrey's signal all would freeze except one individual who had been tapped. That person would move about the space, phrase-by-phrase, making direct eye contact with specific individuals. It was a fascinating way to sneak toward performance without making a big deal out of it. I was grateful. So many things were accomplished in the exercise, from getting used to eye contact to speaking forcefully in public. One possible answer to our coverage quandary is to look for exercises like this one where numerous objectives are accomplished all at once. This session was followed with the requisite gracious break, but I sensed a difference in our conversations now. We had become much better acquainted and discussions were less careful, and more fun. The stacks of photocopies were beginning to appear and most folks, I noticed, were grabbing a moment or two to read through them quickly to get their gist. When we regathered in the theater it was for a session led by Alan. We took up the issue of the previous night's videos and the questions we had been addressing. I felt at a bit of a disadvantage because I had just skimmed the surface of the essays and didn't yet know enough to see the full range of opinions that emerged when I read them carefully later. The discussion, however, was interesting. Many excellent suggestions came forth about the use of video in the classroom. I was particularly pleased with the pedagogical parts of this discussion. The time spent on visible vs. invisible ghosts and stage preferences was fun, but ultimately I thought it was more about taste (including my own vocally expressed preferences) than some of the other issues taken up in this session. I sensed the potential for a good deal of future discussion on the pedagogy of video in the classroom. Many members of the group seemed to have a great deal of experience using it, and in a wide variety of classroom situations. We know enough to know something about the good and the bad sides of it. We also seemed to have favorite video selections and techniques. I look forward to getting into this further. In retrospect I wish that we had found a way to spend more time on sharing our writings from the night before, and from our preparatory assignments. Perhaps we can find a way in a future session to set aside some time to exchange a bit on these things. I am intrigued by many of the threads in these exchanges and essays. I also observe than we often express ourselves in very different ways in performance and in writing. I find this dichotomy interesting and worthy of some attention later. We split up for lunch, my group landing at Le Bon Caf=E9. There were severa= l readers and staff members from the library there, as well. Wasn't it Cardinal Newman that observed real education takes place in the dining hall? I had a feeling I knew what he meant. Unfortunately, I had to cut short my own participation to get back for a spot of rehearsal before we reconvened. We were downstairs in the Board Room again for the afternoon session. Alan spoke to us about the legalities of video usage, and addressed a few ideas about pedagogy that we had not had time for in the morning. I found his discussion of using both good and bad examples helpful. I also liked the simplicity of the pause button technique, which was used to good effect. The great afternoon discovery for me was the "Nicholas Nickleby" excerpts. Finding a way to discuss the differences in comedy and tragedy in a way that is not excruciatingly boring has always troubled me. This seemed a very tangible demonstration of theory. I loved the piece. I was even intrigued by the segmentation of the viewing into two parts--the early section which uses technique to twist the lines, and the latter section where the play is rewritten wholesale. We took another break, and then gathered up in the theater. As an acting teacher I know the tension of a class that senses an impending performance requirement. It was wonderful, then, when Audrey gave us a preliminary exercise of running lines with our partners (very reassuring just before we go on) while sitting back-to-back. It was, as billed, a sensual pleasure, a kind of back rub through vibration. Time finally came and Audrey started our work with the disclaimer that these were scenes in process and by giving us a viewing assignment. I don't doubt the usefulness of the literal assignment, but I know that it helped me to focus on something outside my own nervousness as well. The performance order was established in a way that seemed to be based on where we had been rehearsing. I remember much less than I wish I did about the performances but I have a few fleeting impressions. I remember thinking about the cleverness of Bob's dagger solution. (And his good sense at thinking ahead to bring a dagger.) I remember the fascinating contrast of Ellen's sickly sardonic Lady Macbeth with Julia's drunker, more frightened one immediately after. I liked that two takes on the role could have so much in common while still being very individual. I remember how well I thought Paul used the space. I remember thinking that Bill-Eric had us adjusted to the conventions of the all-male rendition very quickly, and wondering if this is how it worked in Renaissance times. (i.e. Less of a Kabuki-like emulation of the "perfect" woman, and more simply a matter of getting used to the convention.) I remember the strength of Ed's performance and the great clarity of Caroline's. I recall being struck dumb (very unusual for me) by Tom and Cezarija's revelation that they had never before performed before an audience. Their grace under pressure was remarkable. I remember almost nothing of my own performance, but a great many details about my partner's. I especially recall that looming hand hanging over my shoulder where it had never been in any of our rehearsals. How well she knew that would have an effect on me, and to save it for performance as a little surprise. I learned a great deal about this scene just from trying to work it out, and more from Clare's very intelligent exploration of it. In a brief session afterward we all commented on how many viable options came forward in these scenes. I don't think that I can really attempt to summarize all the things that we saw, and all the fascinating avenues that were explored. I was reminded again, however, of the power of performance explorations from doing this work. Knowing the scene first-hand created in me a sense of ownership. I look forward to next month, when I hope to try the scene using some of Shakespeare's words. After our debriefing we adjourned to a nice wine and cheese reception, where we congratulated each other on our performances. I think that we came together remarkably fast as a group, and certainly showed that we have a lot to learn from each other. Later that final evening the theater-going group was heading off to the Arena, just as another small bunch of us wandered off to get a nice quiet dinner. I felt exhausted from the intensity of the work, and exhilarated with the accomplishment of it. I look forward to more! In keeping with my previous experience I have compiled two short additional pieces with these minutes. I want to again say that we may come to very different solutions as a group than the "Potterites" did, and these pieces may prove perfectly useless. They are included here as a way for us to think a bit about previous solutions to record-keeping, which we may keep or reject as we choose. The first of these is a very short bibliography of books and articles that were referenced in the course of our work, including some comments I made earlier in these minutes. A great deal of our work this weekend had to do with video, and I would like to reference those materials, but I didn't have the resources to hunt down all the information on those. The second is a listing of materials that might make up the "archive." For information sake, the "Potterites" archivist, Stephen Buhler did compile a complete set of documents, but his main activity was to create an outline that listed the documents we had gathered. From this we were all able to compile a "personal" copy of the archive. I have tried to create such a document for us, just so we can have a starting place should we choose to continue. Works Cited (September) Berry, Cicely. The Actor and the Text. Revised Edition. New York: Applause Books, 1992. Berry, Cecily. Voice and the Actor. Ist American Edition. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Brubaker, E.S. Shakespeare Aloud: A Guide to his Verse on Stage. Lancaster, PA.: Brubaker, 1976. Dessen, Alan C. Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Linklater, Kristin. Freeing Shakespeare's Voice. New York, New York: Theater Communications Group, 1992. Linklater, Kristin. Freeing the Natural Voice. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1975. Pisk, Litz. The Actor and His Body. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1987. Spain, Delbert. Shakespeare Sounded Soundly: The Verse Structure & the Language. Santa Barbara: Garland-Clarke Editions/Capra Press, 1988. Wills, Garry. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth. New York: New York PublicLibrary/Oxford University Press, 1995. Archive's List (September) Preliminary Materials: Participants list with brief biographies Participants list with addresses Audrey's five part assignment Alan's brief assignment Copy of assigned scenes in Folio facsimile Assignment: Scene and soliloquy paraphrase Scene and soliloquy scansion Journals Notes on stresses, alliteration, assonance, and antitheses Nearly 100 pages of notes from each other Weekend materials: September Schedule Updated Course Program Friday Night Video list and assignment, titled "Staging Macbeth 3.4" Friday night assignments (16 pages) Excerpts from "Voice and the Actor" "Who Would Have Thought It" "Short Assignment on Hamlet" Excerpt from Henry IV, Part I Folio facsimile Thoughts and Issues: Do we want to create a syllabus exchange? Is it useful for us to bring syllabi from classes we currently teach that touch on this subject matter? How do we deal with coverage in our classes. How much is enough? Is there a mechanism whereby we can spend some time discussing the essays and assignments of the group? Tours of the vaults and art collection? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments on the September Minutes 29-30 September 1995 by Clare-Marie Wall Dear Folger Institute Companions, After our September weekend together, it is the memories and the anticipations of conversations with all of you, separately and in groups, that I am treasuring. My bruises from our "easy falls" onto the Folger Theater stage Friday morning are nearly indistinguishable now, but the sense of common purpose and delight in the work stays strong. These notes are short addenda to Kurt's superb narrative of the first weekend. I too confess to having hazy impressions of the first Friday circle, since I was trying to put names to faces, and, I again confess, adding labels of "theater person" or "scholar" to try to make sense of the group. Before long, as expected, those labels were subsumed into all of your individuality, and the idea of "camps," all too familiar on the level of university governance, disappeared. We were reminded that one can seduce a class, perhaps as a reminder that we are ALL actors when we stand or sit in a position of authority before students, and that we should always ask the innocent question. And the warm-ups reminded me that whether on-stage or in class, we should be fit, focused and open to everything. After the lunch break (during which the picnicking group were beset by bees), Alan the Textual Archeologist reminded us that to textual editors, "authority" is taken to mean "authoricity," that "The norm is silence" when it comes to stage directions, and that the drive to disambiguate can block valid theatrical options. But then I'm sure you all have your own extensive notes on these and other text-sessions. Let me just memorialize several phrases. To Paul, the issue is "to ambiguate or disambiguate." Alan's pedagogical goal is "to inoculate students with my own confusion, so I won't be alone." And so the conversation quickly turned to pedagogy. The suggestion was made to use the Leonato/Benedick confusion on "I will stop your mouth" as a workshop exercise for undergraduates. Similar enactments of different editorial cruxes would also work well. I have tended to ask students to write about such issues; how much better for them to perform the choices, and then discuss together what the various effects are. Other suggestions followed. Edward suggested that asking when Gertrude dies provokes interesting discussion. Several suggested doing student performances first, then discussions, then video versions. Three or four should be the limit on versions, Kurt felt. When we turned again to acting work, I found useful the embodiment of the scene's dynamics, when I and my partner walked toward the other on our lines, but retreated when the other was speaking. Feeling attacked by the other's words clarified the interplay of the whole scene, and additionally made me listen to both my own objectives, and his. Later, working in our corner in the Folger audience space, Kurt and I benefited from our real period doorways, the ramp, and, for me, the semi-darkness. In fact, I would recommend to anyone that rehearsing in the dark is a great way to take away some of the stage fright! Also, using an unconventional space rather than a stage is freeing. Instead of worrying about what the audience will "get," one can find out what the characters want. I also was reminded of an old friend moved from acting into directing when he realized that it was rehearsals he loved: he found performances boring. The chance to keep trying things, to not worry when a choice flops or gets stale, to keep fresh by surprising one's partner (tee hee), is a privilege. In fact, I'd have to say that compared to the difficulties and tensions of professional work, the joy of doing that Macbeth scene was intense. A very few additions about the Saturday session with Alan, all having to do the pedagogy. (Please add to these, anyone who remembers more.) We all loved Julia's suggestion to show scenes with the sound off, especially with our visually expert students. Also, when watching videos in class, Caroline suggested having different students watch different characters (singly, or in groups), or various aspects, such as lighting, costumes, movement. They could write quickly on what they see, or share in groups, before coming back together as a class. We were reminded of Patrick Spottiswode's Globe workshop on the finding of Desdemona's handkerchief (perhaps Paul and Alan could explain further). And the dreaded coverage question reasserted itself: 4-6 plays, or 12? Do we need to do each exercise four times, or is once enough? Are we teaching information or method? What happens to the GRE-takers in the house? Questions for the group. What is the NCTE "Rehearsing the Audience"? Cowen's study guide? And what do people think/feel about REALISM, in acting training/performance, in on-stage performance, in audience expectations? Why did Audrey want the audience to experience being voyeurs (of our scene)? Lastly, I agree with Kurt that the FREEING of body and spirit and mind that the weekend provided was wonderful. Sunday morning I went to the special service at the Washington National Cathedral (an old haunt of mine, since I'm a D.C. native), and miraculously was reaching a high E when I am usually a tenor, at best. And let us not forget our assignment for October. We are to bring five important questions each for Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff, and for the costume designer of Macbeth. Further, bring our collages, and an object for each character. Both Macbeth and Hamlet will be our scripts, and more soliloquy work will ensue with Audrey. Au revoir, Clare-Marie -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes and Reflections 20-21 October 1995 by Caroline McManus Friday, October 20 Not having volunteered to serve as scribe until our opening "business" session was underway, I can't vouch for the completeness of my recollections. I think that Bill and Julia volunteered to serve as note-taker and commentator for the November session. Lena usefully demystified the DC taxi system (think Zone 1) and provided us with a somber update on the fate of the NEH. We discussed the advisability of including visitors in our sessions and concluded as a group that our performances should be kept for the group alone and that multiple auditors would radically affect the intimate dynamic that has been established, but that exceptions would be made for certain sessions and visitors. One such visitor was Barbara Ashbrook, an NEH program officer who joined us for the afternoon session and Friday evening performance. Audrey's exercises followed: we lengthened our spines, spread our backs, practiced breathing, sang lines, and (what I thought was the hit--literally--of the morning) kicked, threw, and jabbed as we spoke the final word of each line from our Macbeth soliloquies. We continued to work with the soliloquies, pairing up to locate the caesuras in the lines and then forming two circles, one for the Macbeths and one for the Lady Macbeths, in which we worked on passing the speech's energy from one to another, passing lines and then single words around the circle. In preparation for our afternoon session with "Lady Macduff," we read through Macbeth 4.2. After the usual sumptuous coffee break, Kathleen herded us back in for our text session with Alan. I, for one, was delighted that he broke his ABH policy (anything but Hamlet), because I teach Hamlet regularly and gleaned some helpful ideas for assignments based on the multiple texts available. Handouts juxtaposing three versions of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy and three versions of the end of Act II sparked wide-ranging discussion. Our discussion of the quarto texts generated several ideas for assignments: Should Hamlet be given his final soliloquy? Who does have the last speech in King Lear, Edgar or Albany, and what difference does it make? Discuss the benefits/challenges of performing the different playtexts of Hamlet. Make a case for the performance of the Gertrude/Horatio scene in Act 4; the inclusion of Ophelia's lute; the Ghost's nightgown in the closet scene; both Laertes and Hamlet leaping into the grave. Should Gertrude or Horatio be given the line "Let her come in"? Ed Rocklin shared his "What if the Ghost came back?" assignment: Imagine that the Ghost of Hamlet's father reappears as the body of Hamlet is carried off. He enters, stands downstage center facing upstage and looks at the scene. What would such a figure invite us to see by placing us in a sense behind the eyes of the Ghost? What would his presence compel us to remember, impel us to imagine, propel us to discover? (One could also adapt this, asking students when and why they might bring Macbeth's witches back on stage.) Having partaken of box lunches in the garden (the wasps were a little slower this time), we reconvened on stage for a session with Helen Carey ("Lady Macbeth") and Caitlin O'Connell ("Lady Macduff"). I tried to transcribe the subject of the questions and the main points they elicited as closely as possible. 1) How do you prepare the audience for Lady Macbeth's madness? Helen Carey: She'd crack, not bend. Has tried to locate stress points (seeing effect of murder, distancing of Macbeth); uses sense of smell as spiral into breakdown; banquet scene reveals her incipient madness as well as Macbeth's. 2) What is Lady Macduff's relationship with Ross? with Macduff? Caitlin O'Connell: Receives news that Macduff is gone immediately before scene begins; working through rage, hurt, sense of being betrayed. Relationship to son shifts, as he is now man of house. 3) Do you rely on an impressionistic or text-based justification for your interpretation? HC: Actor strives to share overall understanding; ex. of St. Crispian's Day speech being comprehended by marines on eve of march into Kuwait during Gulf War. 4) What was the effect of adding the costume late in developing the role? How did this help or hinder? CO'C: Ease of movement necessary for Lady Macduff's fighting; raked stage. Shorten hem and sleeves. HC: Heels needed to be lowered to accommodate longer stride; lacing instead of stitching sleeves enabled movement and fortuitously echoed men's costumes; coronation scene costume altered from white top/black skirt to all black (white background). 5) How does the Lansburgh space help or hinder performance of Macbeth, a comparatively intimate play? How do you adjust to other theatre spaces? HC: Folger stage accommodates small movements; Lansburgh's excellent acoustics, space to allow greater movement. CO'C: Tricky contrast between huge set and intimacy of mother-son dialogue in 4.2. Importance of lighting in creating separate spaces on stage. 6) Were any lines cut in this production? HC: A switched scene; LM's "This is the very painting of your fear" speech in 3.4 a rhythmic cut. 7) How did you prepare the role? How did you balance psychological realism and rhetorical, declamatory style? HC: Prepared by reading extensively, watching films for juxtaposition of scenic energies. Stage chemistry changes in each performance. LM does not plan to be fiendlike. Believes she and Macbeth will bring better world; events then trip them up, don't unfold as expected. Intimate marriage: Macbeth turns to sources he knows will support his plan, particularly his lady. CO'C: Prefers not to watch other performances. Relies on chemistry with director and co-actors. Draws on personal resources: feelings of betrayal, urge to protect child. If an actor doesn't feel the emotion, the audience won't. 8) Please comment on the physicalization of the interpretation. CO'C: Extensive rehearsal with fight choreographer. Goal to tell story through action rather than supply gratuitous violence. Lady Macduff directs her energy toward saving remaining child. Actor must be aware of all movements, because the audience will attach significance to anything done on stage. HC: Explored full possession in rehearsal; physicalized with fire, with earth. Physicality especially important in Shakespeare in order to communicate meaning to modern audiences. 9) How close has Lady Macbeth come to killing Duncan? HC: Tough to stage "what-ifs." Tries to register change in LM after she faces dead Duncan. What is not staged can be more horrific than what is. 10) How do you retain a sense of the blank verse, or do you employ more naturalized speech rhythms? HC: String a clothesline of the simple declarative sentence, then hang the verbiage on it. Communicate the energy of the speech rather than specific words. 11) Please describe the nature of Lady Macbeth's madness in the sleepwalking scene. HC: Utterly disjointed. Trying to get rid of smell of blood; pieces of her former marriage, her friendship with Lady Macduff, secrecy, power. As if her life were painted on a mirror and then shattered, and she's picking up shards, one by one. She can't function without his support of/need for her. 12) What do the Macbeths see in each other? What does the audience admire about each? HC: M a warrior, ambitious, sexually appealing in his power. It's a dangerous relationship, each goading on the other. 13) Where are the difficulties or traps within the roles? CO'C: Coming on for only one scene. Difficult to create a sense of genuine relationship without ever having been seen with Macduff on stage. Must pay attention to previous scene's energy. HC: Making character real is a challenge. Link the Macbeths' project to the Susan Smith tragedy--initial reaction might be of horror, incredulity, distance, but once chain of events is traced outcome becomes more plausible. Human tragedy result of series of small choices. 14) How does dynamic with actors and directors work? HC: Joe Dowling encourages actors to experiment. Leaves blocking open--movement will follow intention. Focus on what one character is trying to get from another. Poses possibility, such as "What would happen if you were really possessed?" Then he edits, deciding what to keep, or clarify, or eliminate. CO'C: Actors working collaboratively, teaching one another. Healthy friction--trying out one another's suggestions, but challenging any direction that doesn't work. 15) Who does Macbeth/Lady Macbeth trust? HC: LM only trusts Macbeth. Link with Lady Macduff [?] CO'C: Parallel between LM and Lady Macduff. Both coming to grips with loss of husbands, but LM snaps, whereas Lady Macduff is more of a survivor. Tries to discover how she'll get by in her scene. 16) Is this production an actors' exercise or director's concept? What contribution does the production make to the stage history of the play? CO'C: Director's role is like that of newspaper editor overseeing work of reporters, urging a particular angle on a story. HC: Best performances are seamless; if concept too obvious, play becomes performance art rather than theatre. 17) How does the production engage the idea of Scotland? HC: An intimate community; bloody history of succession. Link to Rob Roy, Brave Heart. 18) What was your experience of Shakespeare when in school? CO'C: Saw performance and was hooked. Students must see as well as read. HC: Memorable teacher of Julius Caesar; required performance work. Contagious enthusiasm. Our discussion of the Shakespeare Theatre's production of Macbeth continued at 3:30, when we met with Stephen Welch (Director, Education Programs) and Mary Ann Powell (Costume Shop Manager). I was struck anew by the degree to which not only Shakespeare's scripts but also each production involves rehearsal, negotiation of power politics (certainly nothing new to the directors in our group), and the exploration of various design concepts (set, costume) within practical constraints. Hearing about the metamorphoses of the original concepts made the production even more intriguing. The discussion reaffirmed the value of such assignments as having students compare and contrast two productions, the first highly stylized, "designed" (for ex., the Shakespeare Theatre's Macbeth) and the second bare stage (for ex., ACTER's Macbeth). Display and discussion of collages followed. The exercise revealed the creativity of the group (as our students sometimes say, "We didn't know we had it in us") and prompted some self-revelation. Paul cogently observed that this three-dimensional exploration involved internalizing the character rather than remaining objective and distanced. This obviously will be a useful assignment for our students, especially those who excel in visual learning rather than in more traditional verbal skills. Friday evening saw us at the Lansburgh, many of us doing a credible imitation of drowned rats. The Folger staff (ever efficient) had thoughtfully arranged for a thunderstorm to achieve the proper ambience ("It was a rough night"). Our Friday evening assignment: "Choose what you find to be a distinctive choice by actor, director, or designers, and discuss." Saturday, October 21 Saturday morning brought crisper weather and renewed rounds of body work (spine-curling and uncurling and flesh melting off our bones) and sound work (proclaiming Heh! with emphasis, envisioning our bodies as three-story structures complete with elevators, becoming train tracks, all creative means of exploring our range of sound). We walked around, proclaiming our soliloquies to anyone we could get to listen to us. We then discussed the Shakespeare Theatre's Macbeth, including such topics as the effect of interpolated scenes on the rhythm of the play and the alteration or deletion of lines. A useful performance-related assignment generated by the discussion would be to have students identify the scene they feel would be the most difficult to stage and explain why, and then brainstorm about possible solutions (the Malcolm/Macduff scene, for example). On Saturday afternoon, Alan showed the prayer scene from four different video versions of Hamlet (played by Olivier, Gibson, Kline, Jacobi). He asked us to consider the following questions: what structural analogues or echoes does the scene suggest (ex. Pyrrhus killing Priam, Hamlet not killing Claudius)? is the prayer scene the audience's first exposure to Claudius' conscience? is the casting of Claudius effective? what cuts would we make in 3.3? how close does Hamlet get to Claudius? what time period is indicated by the setting? what music is evident? Before our afternoon scene work, we shared the objects associated with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth that we had brought with us. (Recent tightening of security at US airports is perhaps less a consequence of terrorist activity than an unprecedented increase in the number of English professors toting daggers in their baggage and wearing small red buttons announcing "I have done the deed.") Audrey gave us (intentionally maddening?) instructions to play against our earlier interpretations of the Macbeth dialogue by first performing the opposite interpretation, then switching roles, and finally returning to our original interpretation. Our discoveries: enhanced understanding of partner's issues, the number of transitions within a particular speech, the sheer joy of "playing." Audrey then gave us our next assignment (developing a one-page diagram of Henry V, marking the entrances and exits of various characters, setting, lighting, song, dance, etc.) and encouraged us to begin thinking about the next scene we'd like to work on. Our final session focused on the pedagogical projects. Given time limitations, we agreed to follow the Potterite model of having 2 or 3 people working on issues of mutual interest. Some of the topics that were mentioned were language exercises, the dynamics of interpretation, teaching in diverse classrooms, gender roles and role reversal, performance issues as related to Measure, the intersection of theatre with other arts, methodologies that ameliorate the "coverage" problem, and the difference between film and stage productions. We agreed to put together a calendar so that the group will know when each participant will be using his or her week in residence. We also agreed that it would be useful to pool our resources re. syllabi, assignments, performance exercises, and lists of videotapes. Works Cited (October 1995) Bertram, Paul, and Bernice W. Kliman. The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio. NY: AMS Press, 1991. Dawson, Anthony. Hamlet. Shakespeare in Performance Series. Manchester Univ. Press. McLeod, Randal, ed. Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance. Papers given at the 24th Annual Conference on Editorial Problems. University of Toronto, 4-5 November, 1988. New York: AMS Press, 1994. Roach, Joseph R. The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. 1985; rpt. Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993. Robinson, Randal. Unlocking Shakespeare's Language: Help for the Teacher and Student. NCTE, 1989. Archives List (October 1995) Assignments: Collages Objects Questions re. "Lady Macbeth," "Lady Macduff," and design Weekend Materials: October schedule Handouts juxtaposing three versions of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy and three versions of the end of Act II Friday night assignment (distinctive choice made by actor, director, or designer) Description of the group project Excerpts from Hamlet (Q1, Q2, folio) (Alan Dessen) Short assignment on Hamlet (Alan Dessen) Questions for actors/designers Shakespeare: monologue preparation (Audrey Stanley) Participant responses to Shakespeare Theatre's Macbeth October Session Visitors: Barbara Ashbrook, Education Division, NEH Helen Carey, "Lady Macbeth" in the Shakespeare Theatre's Macbeth Caitlin O'Connell, "Lady Macduff" in the Shakespeare Theatre's Macbeth Mary Ann Powell, Costume Shop Manager, the Shakespeare Theatre Stephen Welch, Director, Education Programs, the Shakespeare Theatre (as of this writing Peter Avery is serving as the Acting Director of Education Programs) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes and Reflections 17-18 November 1995 by Julia Matthews Friday, November 17 Guests: Michael Kahn, Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre at the Lansburgh Lois Potter, Professor of English, University of Delaware Productions: Twelfth Night, performed by the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, at the University of Maryland at College Park. [Video] Macbeth, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Trevor Nunn, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. How nice to walk into the Folger lobby to the smell of fresh coffee and the greetings of friends. In preparation for Thanksgiving I felt thankful for you all (and thankful for the coffee and those nice pastries, courtesy of the gracious Institute staff). At 9:00 we gathered on-stage for a short discussion of logistical issues. We were glad to meet Lois Potter, who joined us for the weekend in preparation for her December sessions. Audrey urged us on to a discussion of our Henry V graphs and charts. We had been assigned to graph Henry or another play in such a way that each character's entrances, exits, and stage time were clearly delineated. She graciously allowed our complaints ("too many characters!") and encouraged our thoughts. We noted that the chart helped us understand the characters' stage time and their presence in the stage space. Shakespeare's juxtaposition of groups of characters and the resulting irony became clear. This made some eager to begin doubling and tripling the roles (especially after Audrey told us of a production with 11 actors; Paul noted that scholars have made/found charts of Elizabethan doubling practices). Edward suggested making a prose chart of the French scenes (not the scenes with French characters, but the action divided into scenes in the French manner, at the entrance of each new character) before making a graphic representation; both charts help to clarify the rhythm of the play and the sporadic appearances of certain characters (the Weird Sisters, the Prince in R&J). We discussed the importance of exits and entrances for practical directorial concerns. The "through-lines" of individual characters also became clear. Audrey suggested that students might be asked to follow up their charts by writing about their discoveries; the exercise is useful in helping both theatre and literature students perceive structure, and she has found it very helpful in teaching the Greek plays also. We then moved on to a discussion of our cast lists, beginning with a sampling of everyone's Henrys and Pistols. (This made us so eager to hear the rest of the casts that Rebecca kindly went off and made copies of all the lists for our subsequent delight.) The act of casting is one that students can do quickly, and invites them to invest in the play and to recognize their own interpretations. They may be asked to name the qualities that attracted them to their actors (helpful if the doddering professor doesn't know the current teen idols). The question of characters' ages can also start conversations about interpretation. A survey of some of the other plays represented in people's exercises revealed an Othello, a Twelfth Night, a Shrew, a Dream, and a couple of Macbeths. Comments about charting these other plays included a reflection on disparate scene lengths, the clarity of the various plot lines, the absence or presence of dominant characters, and the rapidity and rhythm of the action. This started an interesting conversation about the scene as a unit. Kurt commented that he had been obliged to use French scenes rather than the numbered scenes in order to make his chart. Edward noted that Jonson uses French scenes also, and Alan reminded us that no act or scene divisions appear in Shakespeare before 1610-11. However, as Bob pointed out, some scene changes are more locative than others, and the Chorus provides clear indications of the act divisions of H5. Alan noted that the stage direction "clear" appears in only three plays of Shakespeare's period. Michael Kahn arrived ready to address our questions about Henry V; his graciousness became even more notable when he admitted that it was "hell week" in rehearsal. Audrey invited him to begin by telling us his approach to directing. (I hope that the following shorthand will still be intelligible to you.) MK: might be ready for a change in approach. At start of career interested in expressing self; interesting to return now to two plays staged at beginning of career (H5, M for M). Began then with "concept." Now more inclined to start with play, read many times, let ideas stay in back of head. Close textual examination of script. (Question of editing: usually some, for reasons of personnel, economy, or sometimes dramaturgy.) Close readings lead to an understanding of Shakespeare's intentions, which then leads to the question, "how can I best present that?" While acknowledging the resources available, ask "How can I tell that story?" The choice of set is a big commitment, a "hard moment," difficult to decide on because it limits the play. MK attracted to Shakespeare's ambiguity and flexibility; set "over-defines." Less interested in implications of historical periods. Interested in characters line by line in a scene. Priority: to get actors to the point where they have to say that word. MK attributes the "clarity" of his productions to this emphasis on the specific words and sentences. Not so interested in concept. MK had a "slightly scandalous success in '68" with H5. [C.f. reviews thoughtfully provided by Paul.] That production began with a strong anti-war concept, and a cynical interpretation based on the Bishops' machinations. The production was Brechtian in some aspects, such as the use of titles. Returning to H5 now MK admitted he "can't give up some of the old production," such as the French scenes performed in French (though abbreviated, with translators alongside) in order to create the sense of the Enemy, the Other (established by use of cathurni also). Having just done H4, MK says he understands the Eastcheap characters much better now, that they are the anti-war voices of the play. For the Chorus the production uses a group of people and emphasizes the self-consciousness of acting, the awareness of pageantry within the epic scope of the play. H5 is "not as good as H4, Hamlet, Lear" -- "it's a little harder," not least because of the "damn films looming over you." His impulse to direct H5 came from the Shakespeare Theatre's cycle of history plays, and his interest in exploring H5 with the same actor who played H4. However, the first actor took a job in NYC so MK is now doing H5 with a new actor (Harry Hamlin). On this uneasy note we began to ask our questions: 1) Interest in the lesser characters? MK: very interested in them, having just done H4, especially Bardolph. Has added Falstaff's rejection scene to H5 , so it prefaces Bardolph and the Boy. Thinks originally the same actor would have doubled as Falstaff and Gower; this would justify Fluellen's mention of Falstaff later in the play. 2) Is God on the side of Henry and the English in your production? MK: God doesn't take sides; production juxtaposes the characters' beliefs with scenes of the reality of war. 3) Ideal cast size for H5? MK: 40, but doing it with 29. Doubling includes: Bishop--K of France, Fluellen--Bishop, Alice--Quickly, Nym--Le Fer, Bardolph--Bates. 4) Is Queen Isabel dispensable? MK: leaves her in; a slight but feminine presence amidst all the men of Act V. 5) What about Henry's two orders to kill the prisoners? MK: first order cut in this production, though he wouldn't have minded Henry's appearing less sympathetic because of it. 6) What cuts did you make? Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare? MK: "Sure." H5 problematic dramaturgically; this production cuts Jamy, Macmorris, among others; maybe more cuts in this production than usual, though for different reasons. Might reorder events if helpful. 7) How should audience understand discrepancies between Chorus's version of events and the events as they are enacted? MK: doesn't incline to this interpretation; doesn't see Chorus as "official version" of history. 8) How does production change with the change in leading actor? MK: actor is not transformed by director, therefore director must try to utilize whatever the actor brings to the role. In this case, Hamlin is more heroic than MK had envisioned. 9) What are your persistent questions about H5? MK: questions in resolving production with a new Henry and new conception of the part. Question of how the army lives on the stage. Henry as a strange character who makes speeches but has no conversations; question of a character devoid of personal relationships. 10) How to arrive at ground plan? MK: in this case working with regular designers, so this design is based on many conversations, and the ground plan grew out of the previous productions of R2 and H4; the plan is "fairly Elizabethan." 11) Collaboration with designers? MK: Collaboration is a major part of process. Design not hard in this case, since many elements of costume and set pulled from previous production. Directors and designers must ask "what does the play mean" and "what is the best visual means to express it?" Sometimes this is nearly impossible (Lear). Doesn't believe in "localized" space anymore; feels actors' access to the space, to entrances, exits and to the rhythm of the play are more important. 12) How to achieve the actors talking to each other in rehearsal? MK: spend a lot of time at the table, talk to each other a lot, then try to stay there. "There is no subtext in Shakespeare." Actors' paraphrases gradually reveal the need to speak Shakespeare's words rather than their inadequate glosses. Lots of time spent on versification. If actor means what she says, emphasis is usually right. Then ask listener, "What did she say to you?"; often listener has heard something else, so work on hearing meaning as well as speaking it. People don't listen carefully. Try to find meaning, not a generalized subtext. American actors are at a disadvantage since they are taught to play subtext rather than text: a challenge for acting Shakespeare. 13) Effect of audience? MK: since the Lansburgh audience has recently seen H4, some of the summaries in H5 can be cut. Henry V doesn't act much like Hal; this audience will observe the difference. 14) What did you mean about kabuki and roller skates? MK: actually no kabuki, but "a little Mahabarata." "We got a little tired of fights." [Tune in next month!] 15) How does the political ambience of Washington affect the productions? MK: wonderful, a perk to making theatre here. The audience catches the references, understands the politics. Re political notion of "a just war": Don't think Shakespeare knows whether it's a just war; he certainly throws big questions at a big national epic. 16) What to make of the Katherine and Alice scene? MK: this follows the Harfleur scene and creates the deflation from heroics to domesticity. Katherine has already been offered as the prize to stop the war; she already knows that she's the treaty. 17) Does the Pistol subplot serve as a foil for or a parody of Henry and the main plot? MK: Neither. Pistol and the Eastcheap characters serve as a reality check. They are truthful to their own relationships and experiences and are funny because of that. Helpful to have done Mother Courage to understand their humor. To serve as a foil for Henry's heroics they'd have to be evil. They serve Shakespeare's design of public and private battles, domestic and political fights. 18) Have you made new discoveries in rehearsal? MK: the concept is there to be challenged or changed; it must be tested, so there are always new discoveries. Revelations about Pistol, Nym for MK in this rehearsal process. 19) What is the play about? MK: the complex nature of leadership and war. Why has Shakespeare devoted so much time to the traitors? Again there's the dramaturgical problem of Henry narrating himself, instead of letting the audience see the action. The group discussed the relationship of H5 to H4. Is Henry cutting off his father's legacy of old claims, scores to be settled? Old theory has it that somehow H5 achieves Hal's transformation into the hero king. Perhaps the traitors, the meanness show the price tag for becoming the hero king? Perhaps they state the claims of justice and mercy? perhaps the traitors are merely a political occasion for Henry to make another speech. Lois suggested that the same actor might play Falstaff and Scroop. MK admitted "the play is harder than I thought." With that he went back to rehearsal, and we repaired to our coffee and treats. Suitably fortified, we returned to the theatre for our exercises with Audrey. We began by massaging our feet and moved up the body. We practiced curling and uncurling our spines to the count of 30. Then we moved on to exploring our rib expansion. We imagined our ribs as an umbrella tied with invisible strings to our elbows, so that when the elbows raised the ribs opened. We explored the ribs in front opening, and the ribs in back, and then practiced collapsing the front fibs only, leaving the back ribs afloat. Moving onto the floor we imagined our body as a six-sided box and investigated the expansions and deflations in the box as we breathed. Rising again we "vacuumed the lungs" by blowing all our air out, blocking the nose to new air, and then letting the air finally whoosh into the lungs. This made some of us quite dizzy, but not as dizzy as the next exercise, in which we forced our breath out on a "FFFF" sound and imagined that we were painting a picture with the jet of air. We painted ships and waves and clouds and suns; just when we were getting good at it, we were commissioned to make movies (some quite lurid) about Jack and Jill, still by painting the action with our "FFFF"s. Then we made movies of our soliloquies with our "FFFF"s; by the time we replaced the blowing with Shakespeare's words our voices were powered with lots of strong breaths, and loud, well-supported sounds rang to the rafters. The relationship between the image, the action, and the breath seemed to be much more physical and unified. We gathered to discuss our impressions, and people shared their new insights into the "airy" imagery, the need to speak the words (rather than recite them), and the involvement of the ribs and the breath with the emotions. Audrey cautioned that some young students may not be ready for the deep emotional connections that some of the breath work can uncover, and reminded us that we are making a synopsis of a process that requires much more class time and in-depth study. The process, as we discovered, helps the actor to incorporate the text--not always easy for we "mind-people"! After a convivial lunch in the board room, we convened to begin work on our new scenes. I'm not sure how accurate the following list is: Ellen and Dan: M for M Tom and Bill: As You or Tempest Kurt and Paul: J.C. Miranda and Sheila: Othello Clare, Bob, Caroline, Edward: Taming Ed and Julia: M for M Eric and Cezarija: W Tale We sat with our partners and began the rigorous "word work" on a section of our script. This exercise required us to explore the text one word at a time, trying to let the neutral words be neutral ("and," "the," "by") and to let the charged words drop into their emotional wells ("death," "bed," "body," "shame"). Our partners facilitated this "drop-in" exercise: I would speak a word, and then Ed asked me a question probing the word's associations; I would breathe and speak the word again, and then he would ask me another question, and so on. Slow going, but very intense. I became profoundly aware of the suspense leading up to each new word, and of the complex network of emotional resonances Shakespeare sets up within the dense layers of words, and I was reminded of Michael Kahn's complaint that too often actors play generalized, subtextual "feelings" rather than the textual complexities of the individual words. Linklater's precision forces us to experience each word as a separate, specific force. This slow word work also reminded us of the explorations of sound that Audrey had asked us to do in preparing our Macbeth scenes. At 3:30 Lena collected us and divided us into three groups for a tour of the Folger vaults. There are three collections in the vaults: one for the art work; one for English printed materials prior to 1660; and one for all other rare books. We oohed and ahhed over a First Folio; over Queen Elizabeth's bible (too massive, as Eric pointed out, for reading in bed); over scrapbooks detailing Kean's successes; and daggers handled by the great Hamlet actors. So many treasures! I felt quite envious of the staff member who was accidentally locked in the vault, although Lena and Kathleen seemed to shiver at the thought, and Lena proceeded to tell us a ghost story about the late Henry Folger appearing after hours to a security guard. Dazzled, we convened again at 4:30 to work with Alan who "put on his historical hat" to discuss stage conventions or, in his useful phrase, "theatrical vocabulary," that semiotic system shared and accepted by players and playgoers within a certain theatrical moment. Once again modeling "video pedagogy," he introduced us to his theme with two video versions of the scene in Oedipus when the Messenger from Corinth reveals that Oedipus was not Polybos's son, and Jocasta guesses the truth. First we watched the BBC version, directed by Don Taylor, which uses naturalistic staging conventions within the vocabulary of contemporary students; then we turned to the video of Tyrone Guthrie's Stratford production, which uses the unfamiliar vocabulary of mask and stylized gesture and production. Alan suggested that these two examples can pose provocative questions such as "what happens when actors are prevented from using facial expression?" By generating answers to these questions, students begin to think about historicity, the differences between "us" and "them," which may then prepare them to think about the differences between the modern audience and Shakespeare's audience. Alan noted that editors as well as theatre practitioners work to translate the original theatrical idiom into more palatable, contemporary terms, and provided us with a handout of examples of Elizabethan and Jacobean treatments of night, darkness, and ghosts. These small textual examples prompt discussions of crucial differences between psychological realism and more stylized, presentational "vocabularies." The challenge of portraying darkness on a stage lit by daylight creates necessary conventions of properties and movement; the theatrical demand of "vanishing" may have had its own conventions. In support of example C, we watched the ghost sequence (5.3) from Jane Howell's BBC video of Richard III, in which the ghosts appear as if in Richard's nightmare. Alan suggested discussing what has been traded or lost in this "translation." Editorially, some editors mark individual exits for the ghosts; others follow the 18th c. tradition of the ghosts disappearing en masse. In Q and F the ghosts' entrances are marked, but not their exits. Is a group exit ridiculous? appropriate? (examples E and F suggest a group exit could be conventional for the period) interesting? (creating, with Richmond, a group of 12 figures on stage--a jury? the apostles?) Howell's choice moves away from these possibilities by suggesting that the supernatural has psychological roots. Similar problems exist with night and darkness, as illustrated in Dream, 3.2.401-30. Most editors add stage directions to explain why Lysander and Demetrius do not find each other on stage. Peter Hall's video uses mist and cutting to avoid implausibility, but what would actors have done within the older stage conventions, in daylight? Would the meaning be different? All this, Alan concluded, was a buildup to an exercise for us to stage the brief, dark murder scene of Macbeth 3.3. (Another good example would be the penultimate scene of Othello.) With that we adjourned for a break, returning to the board room later for a viewing of the video of Trevor Nunn's Macbeth, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. There were many magical moments, but one that sticks out was the faint cry of "Cupcake! Cupcake!" coming from Audrey's direction after a particularly gruesome scene. Thanks to Caroline's bi-coastal catering we were able to toast Alan's birthday in style, and he used his new breath technique to splendid advantage in blowing out the birthday candles. A little stunned from the intensity of McKellen and Dench, we staggered back to the hotel to think and write about a single distinctive choice of the production, and how it revealed the play as a whole (or didn't). Saturday, November 18 Saturday morning found us gathered once again in the board room to continue our video pedagogy sessions with Alan. For this session, he addressed endings and closure in comedy and romance. The comedies may be difficult to teach, since one can sacrifice comic pleasures to too much thematic scrutiny, and vice versa, but isolating the final moments may help students articulate what they have understood from the comedy. Alan began by showing the final three minutes of Branagh's Much Ado ("the feel-good approach"). Although students often enjoy the ending, once separated from the rest of the production it becomes ripe for analysis, and demonstrates choices and omissions akin to other choices in the film. (Another useful discussion about humor and seriousness in comedy might stem from a comparison of Branagh's cut version of Benedick's challenge to Claudio with the uncut BBC version.) We then moved on to the final moments of Twelfth Night, which juxtaposes the traditional romantic expectations of marriage and reunion with more discordant elements. As we watched the BBC video, the laughs dwindled to the end. Some interesting discussion arose over Fabian's reading of the letter. A second example, taped off the air, featured Alec Guinness as Malvolio and undercut his display of anger with comic business and music on his exit (prompting the question, should Malvolio's line precede his exit or accompany it?). The third example, from Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company production, prompted discussion of the Viola-Sebastian reunion, which some felt was unfulfilling or incomplete. Audrey suggested that stage space, denied by the camera, is needed to fuel the separation and the reunion. Kurt described the production as a willful attempt to drain any vestiges of comedy from the last moments of the play, and indeed the design and acting were subdued and wintry, with the final image capturing Feste peering in the closed iron gate as the snow fell. Eric described the play as satiric, with holiday folly shut out, but Ellen wished for some sense of forgiveness or resolution. Malvolio, who exited before howling his last line offstage, was compared to Olivier's Shylock, to Poor Tom, and to a '90's victim. Sheila affirmed the sense that Branagh's extreme choices would be great for starting conversations in the classroom. Alan closed the session by showing the workshopped revelation of the statue in The Winter's Tale from Barton's Playing Shakespeare series, which left us quietly amazed. Over coffee we skimmed the one-page critiques of Nunn's Macbeth, hot off the press. 4.1 was a popular topic (the witches' sabbath), and lively discussion arose about the apparitions. Bill felt strongly that they should be supernatural, not hallucinatory, although Clare appreciated the association of the visions with the candles and light imagery used throughout the play. Would Shakespeare's theatre have brought supernumeraries up through the trap door? Does a first-time audience understand what the kings are anyway? Some felt that the loss of the representation of the kings was tied to the production's choice to minimize the political aspects of the play and focus on emotion and acting. Alan invited comments on the "ruthless cutting," especially regarding the last act. Some regretted that Macbeth's final duel, murder, and beheading all happened offstage (off-camera?), and found the ending abrupt and unsatisfying without witnessing Macbeth's demise; but others thought the choice suited the small space and Nunn's emphasis on spirituality and emotion rather than politics. We discussed the ecclesiastic choices made in music, costume and the characterization of Duncan; Sheila felt this boxed in the play and closed the audience off from some of its complexities. Tom reminded us of the importance of hair; others had noticed Malcolm's boyish hair as the antithesis to Macbeth's slicked down look. We discussed the crucial England scene; Edward felt Rees succeeded in making the list of the kingly virtues effective. Ed called our attention to "Macduff on Thorazine;" others shared his concerns, and some tried to imagine justifications (limitations of camera? choosing to emphasize Malcolm?). Audrey suggested that Nunn might have chosen to oppose the histrionic Macbeths with the sober Macduff, but Bill thought Macbeth's dwindling capacity for human emotion should be contrasted with Macduff's emotional rise. Quickly we named a few other notable aspects: the association of Scottish accents with wicked characters; the self-conscious camera work in the Porter scene; the bold choices of Dench (i.e. the incantation) and McKellen (clicking daggers); the nun attending the Lady's sleepwalking scene, reiterating the spiritual stakes of the play; the violation of childhood juxtaposed with the boys' choir voices; the drooling of the Third Witch as well as Macbeth. Fortunately this video is readily available. Lois Potter introduced the plan for December: to build up to the evening performance of H5 on Friday, and to think about enabling inexperienced students to think critically about theatre performance. On Saturday we'll prepare for a "mystery play reading." All are encouraged to bring portable PCs and printers or "at least dark pens." In addition all are to read the articles provided by Lois and to read Bob's article in ELH (Vol. 61, 1994, pp.27-52) on H5. Returning after lunch, we split into four groups to attack the problem of staging Macbeth 3.3, with its problems of darkness, the mystery Third Murderer, and the escape of Fleance. These problems turned out to be stubborn, if not impossible, and each production had interesting features, one with the Third Murderer purposely saving Fleance, one with Fleance carrying Banquo's light, one with a swashbuckling toss of torch from Seton (3 Murd.) to a stupid Murderer . . . and one that I can't recall (sorry). Moving on, Audrey asked a group of seven to stage the murder of Duncan. Interestingly, it was Malcolm and Donalbain who awoke to say their prayers in the group's rendering. The rest staged a version of 3.3 and 4 from a script that Audrey saw at the Shanghai and Beijing Festival, which spliced the two scenes together by a series of freezes, with Macbeth "witnessing" both events, and Banquo's body lying on-stage until it was time for him to get up and come to the banquet table. At 3:45 we met again to discuss future plans. Audrey promised to share the exercises she uses with her students to teach scansion. We tried to sort ourselves into groups to plan our February sessions. I think all did some preliminary talking, and promised to talk more. Bob, Eric, Tom: "language" (spoken v. written), "a clearinghouse for useful techniques" Ellen, Dan, Ed, Edward: Measure for Measure pedagogy, using conflicting readings Paul, Clare, Kurt, Cezarija, Sheila, Bill, Julia: interdisciplinary uses/approaches to Shakespeare Caroline, Miranda: heterogeneity, multicultural concerns (re Othello and M of V) We tried to think about our goals for May. It still seems nebulous, but the idea seems to be to develop classroom options or "scenarios" for teaching specific plays. Perhaps this will be a practical teaching model (workbook?) with assignments, archives, resources, rather than a formal article about teaching. Paul asked about the existing bibliography on teaching Shakespeare, and Edward agreed to bring in some current lists. At 5:00 we found ourselves bouncing off to College Park for the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express's performance of Twelfth Night at the U of Maryland. Although Alan tried to start a discussion as we rode back to Washington, we seemed to be in a mode of "unwinding," and perhaps the charms and flaws of the youthful SSE were readily apparent without analysis. Later at the Chinese restaurant, Bob shared his critique of obscenity as addressed by American law: I encourage you to seek him out if this is an issue that concerns you, as it does me. WORKS CITED Trevor Nunn's production of Macbeth, available from Films for the Humanities & Sciences, PO Box 2053, Princeton, NJ, 08543-2053 (800-257-5126). Kenneth Branagh's production of Twelfth Night is also available there, as are all 11 parts of John Barton's series, Playing Shakespeare. (The scene from The Winter's Tale is from "Passion and Coolness.") Lois Potter, Twelfth Night: Text and Performance Homer Swander, "No Exit for a Dead Body: What to do with a Scripted Corpse?" Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Spring, 1991) [I don't have the inclusive page numbers]. The body in question is young Siward's. ASSIGNMENTS Cast and age lists for Henry V and some other plays. Questions for Michael Kahn about directing and about Henry V. Charts plotting the characters' stage time in Henry V and some other plays . WEEKEND MATERIALS November schedule Two reviews of Kahn's 1969 Henry V. Linklater, pp.36-43, "The Content: Language" Dessen handout: 1) examples of darkness and ghosts; 2) entrances & exits in Dream 3.2; 3) staging exercise, Macbeth 3.3; 4) from letter to Michael Thomas about ACTER policy on cutting written responses to Nunn's Macbeth. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes and Reflections 8-9 December 1995 by Edward L. Rocklin Friday, December 8 Lois Potter, Guest Orchestrator Focus: Henry V For the fourth time, we convened in the lobby of the Folger Theatre, and, while munching pastries and bagels, sipping coffee and tea, we reconnected with our partners in drama. Called into a circle at 9:00, we listened to announcements which, combined with the printed schedule, served to remind us how intense our two days' work would be--as did the minutes which recorded the intense third session. Alan also reminded us of the need to organize the time in February when we will be doing our own presentations and also seeing productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and All's Well That Ends Well. He suggested that the largest group, a team of seven, be given Saturday, while the other three groups (a team of two, a team of three, and a team of four) negotiate the division of Friday. The preliminaries completed, Lois Potter initiated the first of her neatly interlocking designed activities--a sequence of pedagogic permutations which, she promised, would have us working with nearly everyone else in the institute in some configuration before the two days ended. (In fact the complexity of her designs means that I may well be somewhat inexact in the sequencing and details of what follows--my apologies for such slips.) Professor Potter began with exercises on observation, engaging and sharpening our ability to perceive what we see. First, she asked us to focus on an actor performing Henry's soliloquy "Upon the king" (4.1) without the sound. Because the mute took a moment to take effect, we discovered that this performance was in German, and soon realized that in some ways this offered a metaphor to remind us of how often students at first find both Shakespeare's words and theatrical performance "foreign" languages (I always have a few students who say "Isn't Shakespeare in that old English?"). We watched the clip and wrote about what we saw. Lois added that this production was in some sense "Brechtian," and this undoubtedly cued some of our observations. And then we watched again with the sound, and proceeded to note down more observations. Second, we looked at the "O God of battles" segment that leads into the St. Crispian day speech--and encountered a striking scene with Henry speaking this speech while interacting with a woman resting in an ermine-covered bed. This woman shared a cigarette with Henry after he had placed the crown on her head, and their interplay offered an intriguing recontextualization of the speech. Third, we looked at the Crispian day speech itself, delivered to this woman in the bed. In pairs, we discussed what we had seen (for 6 minutes). Then we formed fours in order to continue the discussion as well as make it more complex (12 minutes). Given the cue that this was a Brechtian staging, was the audience supposed to see the exposure of power in a king who practiced his public oratory in a private situation that subverted his claims to be united with his men? And did this scene show that Henry was still privately living Hal's life--that there had been no reformation? In particular, of course, the lines about "gentlemen still abed in England" might became at least ironic if not sardonic in such a performance. Finally each foursome reported to the whole group and these reports led naturally into whole group discussion. (1) Miranda (Eric, Paul, Edward): Some of us thought this was Macheath meets Mother Courage, responding to the general irony of the staging. And we noted how oddly the speech works when addressed to a single auditor. (2) Julia (Kurt, Bob, Caroline): Kurt would never have guessed it was Shakespeare in this film noir style. People commented on either the arrogance or passivity of Henry's delivery. (Is the hands-in-pockets pose inflected for gender?) Who is the woman? strumpet of fortune? camp follower? does she dream Henry and his future? can we imagine the woman as the Dauphin? Is Henry rehearsing the speech? (3) Cezarija (Sheila, Ed, Bill): The striking intersection of sexual and martial worlds in a camp bed--does this Henry enact the sexuality so absent from the play until its very last scene? (4) Ellen (Dan, Clare, Tom): Can we see the tent as Eastcheap? This seemed to be an alienated, cold, manipulative Henry--making people wonder if he was too cold to be a successful leader? And in his playing with the crown is he echoing the scene in Henry IV where he takes the crown before his father is dead? Is this "easy lies the head that wears a crown"? Lois asked "What did you think when you heard the German version of the speech?" Clare found it flat, Paul heard interesting phrasing, Ellen found the German beautiful. Lois also asked "Were you decoding the picture? the sound? the camera shots?" And we moved into a long discussion of what we saw and even more how we saw what we saw. Lois agreed that a foreign language impels us to mimic the student condition, as well as to make the visual dimension the dominant focus of our attention. At our 10:30 break in the Theatre Lobby, we were joined by Jim Lusardi who, with June Schlueter, edits Shakespeare Bulletin, and after distributing copies of the Summer 1995 issue invited us to be reviewers. We reconvened at 10:45 a.m. in the Theatre for Lois's next session on writing about performance. We moved into four groups of four, with each group looking at some coherent portion of the readings Lois had asked us to complete for this morning. Each group had a card with its assignment laid out (I do not seem to have card #3, so what I offer is a paraphrase). (1) Theater History: Sprague and Foulkes (on Calvert) Tom, Ed, Ellen, Clare. What are the difficulties of reconstructing early (pre-movie) performances? What can one learn from productions belonging to a different time/place/culture? Give specific examples of information that you found useful. Discuss the visual images if you wish. In their report, this group focused on what we can learn from reports of such productions. We can learn about: (1) Choices of plays to be performed. (2) In the case of Henry V, how this play is recontextualized by being performed during various wars. (3) Its ongoing dramatic viability. (4) Cuts made, both enduring and unique. (4) Shifts in theatrical focus, such as the emphasis on antiquarian correctness in setting and costume in the 19th century. (5) The casting of women in roles such as the Chorus. (6) The interplay of production history and historical reconceptions of either Henry's or Shakespeare's time. (7) The use of promptbooks as sources of information (at times only partially reliable) on casting, cuts, props, doubling, costumes, and blocking. (2) The Theater Reviews of Henry V Bob, Caroline, Edward, Bill. Identify (a) the different strategies used by reviewers and (b) the different assumptions implicit in these reviews. Find a key word or phrase for each of these. Do different kinds of production bring out different kinds of review? This group focused mainly on identifying review-strategies, which included: (1) The basic journalistic review, which covers most or all the elements that appear on the modern program-director, other designers, cast as well as the nature of the theater space--and may enumerate striking conceptions and outstanding performances. (2) Reviews which focus on the relation of text to production, and may, for example, find the performance not matching the complexity of the text; or, perhaps conversely, reviewers who focus on the coherence or incoherence of the production. (3) Reviews which focus on the production in the context of a star actor's or famous director's career or body of work. (4) The use of production history as a template against which to judge all productions. (3) Focus on Actors: Calvert, Olivier, Branagh Eric, Sheila, Julia, Paul How much does an actor's insider-view tell about the play for/in the theater? This group formulated its answer as some questions that actors' accounts often enable us to explore: (1) Does the actor try for a "correct" or an "open-ended" interpretation? (2) Does the actor offer (revealing) anecdotes? (3) Does the actor offer insights into the rehearsal process? or how the production's key choices were made? (4) How recent is the actor's memory of the production? (5) What format does the account emerge from or appear in? actor's own account? memoir? question-and-answer interview? (6) Does the account focus (egocentrically) on the actor's performance (perhaps in terms of whole career) or on the play or production as a whole? does it stay within the theater or focus on larger cultural issues? Audrey suggested that we were indirectly exploring another issue, namely what can people trained in literature bring to the investigation of performances, productions, and theater? (4) Essays by Tatspaugh, Fitter, Lane (and Branagh) Cezarija, Dan, Kurt, Miranda. How would you account for the differences between Tatspaugh and Fitter on the Branagh Henry V? Draw on Branagh's own account if you wish. Which episodes in the play and film would you want to see yourself in order to arrive at your own conclusion? If you have a copy of Bob's essay, do include it here. One question the group raised was "Why was Fitter so outraged at Branagh's production?" and this led to discussion of how convincing we found Fitter's conviction that Shakespeare was incontrovertibly if covertly subversive in his design. The strategy of Fitter's essay was to privilege Adrian Noble's production and show how Branagh betrayed that subversive production in order to achieve a more pro-Henry and presumably more popular film. Tatspaugh's essay was seen as useful for examining how the roles of the Chorus and Mountjoy were transformed by resegmenting, cuts, and accretions. Branagh's account was deemed both useful and disingenuous in downplaying Branagh's own ambitions. Bob Lane's essay was admired for its clear logic and precise use of evidence from both text and performances. Scenes the group members thought it crucial to view or view again included the hanging of Bardolph, how Henry responded to the murder of the boys, the playing of the Chorus (several people thought Fitter was either mis-remembering or misconstruing the Chorus's speech on the battlefield) and the crucial eve-of-Agincourt encounter of Henry with Bates, Court, William. Energized, we adjourned to the Board Room where the Folger had again provided lunches which we ate while continuing conversations. Staying in the Board Room, we began Lois's next session, focused on "reading" visual materials and on the plusses, problems, and puzzles of using these visual aides. Lois moved us through a series of nineteen slides, offering examples of both clear and ambiguous visual texts. One question she asked us to examine was "Do these visual materials resemble the productions and raise the same issues as those provoked by our reading?" She also noted how visual materials immediately and persistently raise issues about intentionality and the different degrees of intentionality in different classes of material. Can everything be decoded clearly? what about elements we can't decode? and so on. Some questions we raised: Are students more confident in talking about pictures than words? What about ourselves? Paul talked about how startled students are to learn of the comic book version that has the authentic text. And we discussed the activity of having students story-board a scene as a way of initiating discussion of how to move from text to image. Lois suggested that we have students look at sample title pages. And she pointed out how visual images obviously date much more emphatically that verbal text. Paul reminded us of the computer theater-game which enables students to stage scenes from Hamlet (MAC only, from Larry Friedlander, Stanford). There is also Shakespeare Karaoke, and Paul discussed having students draw pictures of phrases, and mentioned a student who now does this on her own. Sheila also mentioned her colleague Harry Rusche and a WEB site. At 2:30, after our break and still in the Board Room, we moved into a video session led by Alan, Bill, and Bob. Alan offered a brief prologue, repeating that his central concern is to offer a wide spectrum of ways to use video in class, even as with his classes his object is to offer tools for exploration, not answers. He also suggested that we can use the opening Chorus as a tool to discuss how stage productions and movies are different mediums, in such dimensions as presence/absence and control of point of view; and, in his reading, how the speech functioned on the original Globe stage to define a problem and offer a solution for the challenge of representation. This issue could be exemplified both within the Olivier movie, which puts a playhouse inside the film and by comparing this move with Branagh's, which stages its film-origins by having the Chorus open on a sound stage. Alan also reminded us that what we do pedagogically is shaped by our agendas. We watched the opening Chorus speech in Olivier's film (1944) and Branagh's (1989)--noting how in the films the opening lines suggest a reversal, namely a stage for a kingdom. One question Alan suggested we can ask is "What doesn't work in these words when uttered in these films in these settings?" Bill started from a key point, namely that many of our students tacitly know TV and film forms and conventions, but have no conscious grasp of what it is they know: "They are saturated and responsive but not reflective." In his precise and detailed session , Bill proceeded to do two things at once. On the one hand, he demonstrated the advantages of a video laserdisk version of a movie in breaking down a film frame by frame, in this case to show us how Olivier and Branagh orchestrate the Agincourt battle--which is of course the battle that Shakespeare's play pointedly does not give us. And on the other hand, he offered us an exemplary analysis. Bill also introduced us to interesting film conventions, such as the "good" army moving left to right while the "bad" army moves right to left when showing whole armies (as opposed to identifiable characters) in action. Branagh's Agincourt, he noted, is praised for its realism and dark portrayal of war, but in fact is not realistic at all but expressionistically staged, shot, and scored: "Only the mud is real (and historical): as Canterbury says, 'List but his discourse of war, and you shall hear / A fearful battle rendered you in music" (1.2.46-47). And that is what Branagh has done--offered us a battle staged as visual music." Bill showed how Branagh, with only a few extras, created his battle and then filmed it in medium and close up shots, since a long shot would reveal how few actors he had; and also how he orchestrated action and sound and music in subtle but complex ways--in some cases translating the words into filmic action. We looked at the sequence in which the Chorus approaches us yet seems not to near us through the archers' stakes (done with a telephoto lens to flatten perspective). The Chorus's words seemed askew here, since he seems to be apologizing for a medium's inadequacies in one of its most "realistic" moments, but in fact, Bill noted, the Chorus is correct, since Branagh filmed this scene not with the hundreds of men and 120 horses Olivier had but with 25 men and 10 horses. Bill also broke down how the sound of the arrow volley--which Branagh took over from Olivier--is assimilated to the soundtrack music; noting also the repeated use of the same footage as another measure of economy. And he showed us how the scene gets more expressionistic, more "beautiful" and moves into slow motion to aestheticize the battle--while the motion is slowed, the swords ring in real time. During the report of the casualties, we saw how the sound of thunder, presumably representing God's voice, was used to certify "O God, thy arm was here." And we examined the famous 3-minute-47-second-long shot of Henry walking with the Boy in his arms to the swelling chorus of "Non nobis": Bill traced how the camera tracked the scene, attending to the not-obvious ways it moved up and down, negotiating between the necessities of the landscape and the pressures of Branagh's designs. Finally, Bill offered us his interpretation of the shot in which Branagh cast down his eyes to indicate shame--an interpretation Bill thinks is not what we read or should read from this moment. Bob started by saying that he had planned to call his segment of this session "Realism versus Stylistic or Stylized presentation," but that Bill's analysis had left him uncertain this was a useful title. He suggested we could continue to look at key issues in film/video by comparing Olivier's film with one by Derek Jarman's which presents a striking filmed version of war combined with Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem". In the excerpt that followed we saw a complex layering of scene and flashback which was at once stylized and yet also realistic in some details. We began to compare the Jarman soundtrack with the Branagh: in the Jarman, the music by Benjamin Britten is a pre-existing score, hence might to some extent constrain the film-maker to shape the visual dimension to the sound. And Britten's work itself is a collage, as the film is, since it combines the Latin requiem mass with the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Furthermore for at least some members of an audience the "War Requiem" has its own musical and cultural history. In the course of Bill's presentation, and particularly in regard to the way Branagh orchestrated sound/music and action, several people spoke of how the sound was clearly designed to manipulate our responses and Audrey spoke of the "Emotional blackmail of the music." Caroline asked "When is the music (soundtrack) not musical blackmail?" Although it seemed as if several people wanted to begin to articulate a distinction between modulation and manipulation of response, this issue was left unpursued. Bill's presentation also raised the issue of how seeing segments in slow motion or frame-by-frame analysis and three or more times in succession was beginning to change our response. Several of us raised issues about the different ratios of response different spectator's might have. Obviously there are issues of expression versus reception that we might also have pursued--and that would also connect back to the issue of intention raised by Lois earlier. Eric reminded us of a useful distinction: realism is a style, naturalism is a philosophy. And we continued to discuss the question "How do we represent violence on the stage? and in film?" This session led into another break in the Board Room, and we returned to the Theatre for our 4:00 p.m. session with Lois exploring theory and practice in another way. This time, divided into four groups of four people, we were each given a copy of Henry V 4.8.58-73, along with a different scenario and parallel commentary on that scenario, and invited to perform this version of the segment. The excerpts were from Robert Hapgood's Shakespeare the Theatre-Poet, and specifically from the chapter in which he offers a model for performing imaginary rehearsals. After 20 minutes of rehearsal time, each of the four groups offered its performance, with some strikingly different actions. These performances also raised issues about the relation of the players' intentions to spectators' perceptions. 1 Miranda as Henry, Julia as Williams, Tom as Exeter, Bill as Fluellen 2 Bob as Henry, Ellen as Williams, Cezarija as Exeter, Eric as Fluellen 3 Kurt as Henry, Sheila as Williams, Clare as Exeter, Edward as Fluellen 4 Paul as Henry, Ed as Williams, Caroline as Exeter, Dan as Fluellen We shared our perceptions and plunged into further discussion of the complex possibilities of dissonance and harmony in this moment and of the relation of the different performances to the larger design--how the design shapes perception of the moment, how the performance of the moment shapes the emerging design. This led us back to discussing the options for playing the Chorus and the audience's understanding of what is happening to the "band of brothers," hence of how the play ends. Ellen connected this moment with the end of Measure for Measure, seeing in them both Shakespeare's practice of depicting a ruler who tries or tests others and then suddenly finds himself on trial. We also discussed some of the strategies evident in the packet of thirty-three reviews we had read: some critics look for touchstone speeches or actions, as Trewin does. We talked of how such points might also be useful for professional reviewers who must remember and immediately write about the vanishing performance. (In an aside, Lois quoted a wonderful line from Boswell who, struggling to keep his journal current, said "I have sometimes thought a man should not live more than he can write." This is a sentiment I suspect each of the people keeping minutes for the seminar can understand.) Lois examined a model for reviewing performances derived from the work of Patrice Pavis: Shakespeare: Performance Questionnaire Adapted by Lois Potter from Patrice Pavis 1. What were the stage space and audience space like? 2. What was immediately striking about the "look" of the production? 3. Was there a set? What was it like? If it was changed during performance, how was this done? 4. What kinds of sound were you aware of (include silences, non-vocal noises)? 5. Did you notice anything about the lighting? 6. Did any costumes stand out as especially significant? Could you tell what period they were meant to be? 7. How would you describe the pace of the production? If there was an intermission, describe any differences between the parts (e.g., did the pace move more quickly after the intermission?). 8. What moments gave you particular pleasure or unease? 9. In what ways, if any, did the director's interpretation differ from what you had expected? Which elements of the production did s/he most emphatically employ to convey that interpretation? 10. Did the audience reaction ever surprise you? How so? 11. How would you describe the use of space, including blocking Let me end my annotations with a remarkable piece I found while browsing the Washington Post-Mortem of last week. The Witch a Tragi-comedy by Thomas Middleton, As performed on 9 December 1995 at the Folger Shakespeare Library by an all-star cast, directed by Lois Potter. A review by Edith Plinge. Revivals of this play by a lesser-known contemporary of Shakespeare are sufficiently rare to warrant gratitude from this critic. The world created by this production was one of brilliantly self-conscious theatricality, especially in terms of casting and doubling. Almost too loudly appreciated by the at-times hooting onlookers, the capable performers concealed their lack of rehearsal time admirably. The simple setting in the Board Room at the Folger was a circle formed by the performers' chairs, which vividly evoked a conjuring ring. The cast's chanting of the third Song created an eerie sense of ritualized diablerie, while the refreshments waiting on side tables inevitably recalled the gruesome concoctions described in the play (although the food provided by the suavely efficient Folger staff proved harmless, even delectable). The present reviewer subscribes to the view of Professor Lois Potter that the theatrical critic's first responsibility is to record, not just to pick out one's favorite bits. As Professor Kurt Daw has equally acutely remarked, however, in a different context, what awful theater-goers we eggheads make. While I shall attempt to avoid the pitfalls my learned colleagues have so aptly deplored, I must devote the bulk of this review to appraising the actors and their efforts. Suffice it to say that performances were generally outstanding. At the risk of absurdity, I would sum it all up by noting that each performer consistently rose above the rest. Although it is beyond my power (and yours, dear reader) to go though each actor's achievements seriatim, I below give hints, indications, judiciously chosen highlights. The rest is silence. Audrey Stanley as Stadlin maintained her personae as the watchful, genial maker of stage magic; Lois Potter as a guest spirit, Hoppo, helped in this role as well; and Alan Dessen proved a beneficent Governor. A sprightly Hecate was ably sung and acted by Julia Matthews, bewitching her hearers; while if Isabella (Ellen Summers) got a kiss from her husband Antonio (Bill Taylor) for her singing, it was more than she deserved (or got on her wedding night, apparently). A patient, earnest Sebastian/Celio was rendered by Bob Lane, whose character "loves not" the witches he nevertheless consults, supported by friend Fernando (Edward Rocklin)--a "faithful, pitying friend." The aptly named Amoretta (Lena "if You Can Play Sincerity You Can Play Anything" Orlin), the fallen sister-in-law Francisca (Caroline McManus) and the lascivious Duchess (Clare-Marie Wall) all demonstrated Middleton's vision of the frailty of women, while gasping Gaspero (Dan Colvin), Almachildes, a fantastical gentleman, in a fitting performance by Ed Isser, and the oddly endearing witch-child Firestone (Kurt "The Great Cat for One Night, Mother!" Daw) all gave the counterblast to men. Only characters like the servant Hermio (Tom), the Duke (Eric), and Florida (Cezarija Abartis), the courtesan with a heart of gold, gave evidence of a mitigated rage against the follies of humankind. Certainly the slimiest case walking was that of Paul Nelsen's Azerbanes, before whose advent wise mothers lock up their daughters. Here was a night to remember. Three ounces of the red-haired wench, indeed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes and Reflections 19-20 January 1996 by Bob Lane Friday, January 19 Note: The use of "[ ]" indicates my comments (where I couldn't help myself). Guests: Michael Friedman and Cary Mazer Due to weather we were short-handed when we convened (Paul and Cezarija missing). Lena announced that the second half of the stipend would be delayed, noting that we were over budget on travel. There followed some comments re the tax impact of stipends and expenses. Alan then introduced our guests: Michael Friedman of the University of Scranton has written on Shakespearean comedy, combining textual study, cultural study, performance history, and close reading. He is currently doing a lot in his creative work, research, and teaching that intersects with our work. [To contact Michael: Dept. of English, U. of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510; Home-717-969-6179. Office-717-941-4229, FAX-717-941-6361; e-mail FriedmanM1@jaguar.uofs.edu] Cary Mazer, in the Theatre Department at the University of Pennsylvania [To contact Cary: 8132 Cadwalader Ave., Elkins Park, PA 19117; Home-215-635-1365, Office-215-898-7382, FAX-215-573-2063; e-mail cmazer@sas.upenn.edu], is a performance historian of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He directs students and uses performance in the classroom. He has worked with and is currently working on the issue of character in Shakespeare's plays. His specific question for the performance of Shrew that we were to see that night: Assuming the production will solve issues of love, identity, desire, marriage, and romance, what decision does the production make about one key issue of character, and how did you know that was the decision, i.e. what were the theatrical signals that communicated this or the shared assumption between the production and the audience that communicated this? Alan further instructed us to see the play "cold," i.e. not to share information about reviews. After we introduced ourselves to Michael, he began his presentation, noting it was not the classroom he had imagined, and that his only instructions from Alan were to "just do your thing," prompting the question for him of what exactly that was. He decided to put us through a version of a Shakespeare in Performance course he taught several years ago, based in turn on a class he took with Michael Gibbons when he was an undergraduate, a course that was a defining experience for him. In his teaching he tries to duplicate that experience, to bring the thrill of it to his own students. His plan for his two 2-hour sessions is in three segments each: today-30 minutes of introduction, 30 minutes of warm-ups (dividing us into 3 groups of 3 each), and 1 hour of rehearsal in groups; tomorrow-45 min.-1 hour of rehearsals as refresher, 30-40 min. of performing scenes and talking about them (the core of the experience), and 30 minutes of his description of how he works from his teaching to his scholarship. He passed out the syllabus (now several years old) he used for the January term (3 weeks, 5 days a week, 2 hours per day) when a visiting Assistant Professor at St. John's. The course, for underclassmen, focused on a single play in performance for the entire term. The space you work in is crucial--it must be suitable for the activities described here, especially spacious enough to allow the different student groups to work separately without undue distraction. He chose All'sWell because it was then the focus of his scholarship. Of the two versions of the play included in the class, the Signet is easy to act with and the Arden has a better textual apparatus. Having a variety of texts in the room helps make the textual cruxes clear for the students. Because of the level of students, he could not assume any background on their part. His first assumption was that students would get more out of the scenes if they prepared, so that 2/3 of their grade was the reading journal, which recorded their work on two tasks: responses to the daily reading and close reading of the scene for that day. Michael also included Alan's article re theatrical conventions from the Cambridge Companion, which took a couple of weeks to bear fruit. He avoided readings re performance history until the end because he wanted the students to develop their own scenes, not copy others'. He used the Shakespeare in Performance series for performance material. Each session of the class was divided up into the sections described above. The students were resistant to the warm-ups which Michael considered the most important part of the class because it got them ready to go. They were initially very self-conscious and inhibited, did not want to stand out. We must rid them of the fear of looking silly or they'll never make bold enough choices. Key to success is the tone the instructor sets; it is useful for the professor to embarrass him/herself (e.g. somersaults). He devised a late song as a penalty for tardiness ("Please forgive me," sung to a Patsy Cline tune). Michael demonstrated this to hearty applause. Stage Two was working on the staging for that day's scene, a process that varied with the number of persons required for the scene. During this period Michael remained detached, observing from a distance, or helping the students understand the passages, but avoided "try this." He had to learn from them and they would not be creative without him staying out. They must have the freedom to do their own staging. Stage Three was performance of the scene: Did they pick up cues in the text or not? What choices did they make when there were no clues? How were their choices based on interpretive assumptions and what were those assumptions? Michael suggested alternatives for their reflection and related these suggestions to the performance of other scenes. Gradually the students begin to see connections. Our questions: How large a class? 15-20 students. Flak from the theater department? They were so separate they didn't care; more likely turf problems when it's close to the English Dept. Observers? Some in each group were always watching and commenting-some students did not want to act (participation in the class was 1/3 of the grade). Michael might now require the observers to write something. He might also consider videotaping early scenes. How does this experience translate to a semester-long course? [my notes don't have an answer] Can you get them to rehearse outside class? Depends on the kind of school and student. The ideal is to teach the class before rehearsal starts on production of the play, which gives you a very obvious goal to work toward at the end of the term (more possible with a semester course than a month-long one). Or divide the play up and make each group responsible for an act. Or have the teacher drop in on rehearsal. Next we did exercises with Michael (mostly taken from Viola Spolin's work on improvisations for the classroom). For the whole group: Get in big circle-stretching (and shrink)-shake out limbs: Vocal exercise-5 note scales-watch my arm, low or high; mirror exercise in pairs-facial expressions and body movements; Walking (peaceful stroll, proud. dejected, in a hurry, tiptoeing quietly, nervous pacing, big flop); Backrub in circle-imitate touching action around the circle. For groups of eight in a circle: Fruits, own names, then characters from the play; Saying single line as a group-match pitch, tempo, emotion; Group jumping-exhale down, inhale up-lift those beside you-must work together. Then Staging the Scene: break up into small groups, instructions: 1) Choose roles; 2) Do your table work-spend time making sure you understand the meaning of the dialogue and character objectives first before you put the scene on its feet-avoid making cuts or changes-deal with what is there; 3) Develop a rough idea of staging-identify crucial choices you need to make and discuss the options-get a sense of the blocking; 4) Type of stage is up to us, not trying to reproduce Shakespeare's staging. Our next session was with Cary, who began with a bit of autobiographical, institutional context: his dept. is swarming with New Historicists who have discovered the theater as the public art form in the community, investing the act of performance with sociopolitical significance which is specific to time, place, and conditions. Others of his colleagues are looking at reception: the re-invention of Shakespeare, the canon, biography, editing, packaging, publishing of the script in later specific times. This incursion of non-performance oriented scholars into areas at least tangential to performance is in a sense his topic. Theater history combines concerns with history and reinvention with focus on the phenomenon of performance. The Shakespeare in Performance fashion, which began in the '60s, sees the performance as realizing the script, the script as encoding performance. The script is a score which readers decode, though any single performance is inadequate to all the potential the script contains. A more adequate view of performance sees the script as only one of an arsenal from which one builds theatrical work, an occasion, but performance is a work of art from raw materials which include the physical, aesthetic, actors, cultural significance of performance, and the script. Even so, theater people may say they are "realizing" the script: The intentional fallacy reigns. Even when they do say this, however, they are creating a work of art. In fact, those who say that's what they are doing are more interesting to study. If performance is realization, performance history provides data to draw on, it augments our knowledge of what is there to be realized, data about what choices can be made. Marvin Rosenberg's career reflects the crystallization of this understanding of performance history. Since his first book on Othello, his work has been directed toward cumulating realizations in order to flesh out what's encoded in the script. The problem with an uncritical cataloguing of data on performance is that theater artists, especially of earlier periods, don't have the same aesthetics we do. We must know the conventions in order to decode. For example, things broke in the period 1642-1660: female actors appeared on stage, the stage was treated less as a platform and more as a locale depicted by pictorial scenery. But how to handle the problem of history? The New Historicists/cultural materialists look at consciousness/subjectivity in the 16th-17th centuries and their work (e.g. that of Catherine Belsey) poses the question of whether there was a radically different notion of subjectivity and the enactment of human behavior? The question means that it is not safe to merely decode. When an actor says s/he understands character, what is s/he doing? Typically actors assume the playwright's notion of character and psychology are the same as theirs, but differences on this score may confuse the process of bringing our understanding of contemporary acting to Shakespeare's plays. For ex., Barton, Linklater, et al., stress that the actor's relationships to language are different in different periods. This may complicate our teaching as well. Examples of how the different assumptions about character come into play: In our materials the excerpts from Mary Cowden Clarke show how, in the process of inventing fictions she deploys her own culture's assumptions about character. The second set of documents shows in the effort to describe what it is an actor does (with doubtful success) how the writers enlist the vocabulary of their era to describe the relationship between the actor and the character. Helena Faucit Martin's piece is in the middle of the two sets, combining fictional and personal narrative Turning to the specifics of the documents, in Ellen Terry's "The Pathetic Women" there is a striking emphasis on physical characteristics: e.g. is Rosalind in LLL black, to which question Cary responded are you black? The physical nature of the character entails what's imaginable and implies a whole taxonomy of genre and substance (universal/particular, monstrous/conventional, etc.). How will two different actors, with different physical and psychic makeup, play the same role? Alan noticed the use of nature, that holding a mirror up to nature is in fact culturally specific, esp. as Cary noted as it relates to the worth of the actor. Coquelin's argument is that the actor is not limited, that there are two consciousnesses in acting which render the actor as both sculptor and clay. The idea of two selves is in turn appropriated by both Diderot (a Victorian because he published so late) and the anti-Diderot camp as well, used in service of emotionalist arguments, that the actor should marshal his/her real emotions. Coquelin uses his own life as a third term, suggesting a hint of the Stanislavskian affective memory, though for Coquelin it is part of your material, not an experience to be re-lived. Diderot's position on the other hand: cold heart, warm head. Alan revealed he started out with romantic assumptions, a la Olivier's image, that all actors could play the part, but actors persist in talking about who is "right" or "wrong" for a particular role, referring to physical and social (e.g. class) limitations. Cary pointed out that embedded in Alan's comment is the issue of what makes character credible and what tools does the actor have to accomplish that; if the actor's self is important, what is the relationship between the actor and the role that makes it so? Kurt noted that most actors talk as if there were a one-to-one relation between the actor and the role, but the audience's reception is a different issue. Ed noticed the difference in film, where the actor stamps the role more easily (e.g. James Stewart) than in theater. Julia emphasized the importance of reception because character is convention, so we need to know the audience's expectations. Ellen gave the example of the audience that wanted to see the divine Sarah (Bernhardt), but wanted to see something different in Duse. Sheila underscored the disjunction between the actors' writing, working to discover the role, and the audience and theatrical realities breaking up that process. Audrey pointed out that actors are very different, in how many levels of perception they bring to the lines. Some actors who may be very small physically are capable of great transformation to fill any role; the great ones can play any role. Also, it's important to remember that in Shakespeare's plays there are categories of roles. Clare observed how different performances can shift our own consciousness of the character and lead to different interpretations both literary and theatrical. Cary recited the audience adage that a character-is not the kind of person who-what does the audience mean when they say this? What do we mean when we say "I can't believe that character did x" as opposed to "that actor did not convince me about the character"? Ed Isser referred to the example of audience discomfort, the sense of a moment not working, when an actor fails to cry when the script makes clear s/he should. Cary mentioned Joseph Roach's The Player's Passion, a history of acting via a history of acting theory via a history of science. It reveals how what is "natural" depends on a cultural paradigm, and works from the premise that the predecessor arts are more accessible. For instance, Roach's "Garrick, the Ghost, and the Machine" uses physiology to inform the study of acting, focusing on Hamlet's seeing the Ghost and Garrick's use of a pneumatic wig that enabled his hair to stand on end. Roach's argument is that mechanics tells us about the 18th century idea of what constituted an emotion, how fluid motion led to gesture. Cary also referred to the chapter in Tom Jones in which Tom takes Partridge to see Hamlet. Partridge is the image of the naive theatergoer; by Act 4 of the play he is terrified by the Ghost. The ability of the actor to generate this reaction leads the audience to invest his/her stimulus with naturalness, i.e. natural = convincing. In contrast, Partridge liked the actor playing Claudius because he spoke loudly and clearly on stage, everyone could tell he was an actor. Alan emphasized the importance of anomalies, that which doesn't fit with the rhetoric of the times, that time or ours (an example of the latter being the "points" basic to 19th century theater which seem so unnatural to us). Cary referred to Shaw's allusion to "points," in which two conflicting schemes show themselves in his comments on Duse and Bernhardt. "Points" embodies the idea that the passion is demonstrated in bursts, radical and intense expressions or changes, that certain lines are operatic high notes in terms of physical expression and emotion. The concept entails comparativity and quantifiability. Shaw's organicism, Duse's blush, is the next stage in the point system: connecting the dots with lines to create a sense of flow [is this akin to the modern acting concept of a character's "spine" or "throughline"]. Typically Shaw's comparison is taken as craft (Bernhardt) vs. affect (Duse), but there are paradoxes: I) Duse's action is very precisely, vigilantly crafted and 2) the more organic or holistic or natural Duse is in performance, the more she is different from her "ordinary self"; the more complete is Duse's presence, the less she is like Duse. Audrey commented that the instantaneous ability to go to depths of emotional intensity is the mark of great acting, and finding where that is in the body bypasses thought. Cary noted in the Helena Faucit material the repeated motif of images of faces seen just before death, revealing an emotional connectedness to death which made him feel jinxed since everyone associated with the essay dies. Audrey suggested that for her this was a way of keeping the emotional juices alive. For her, Cary offered, the deaths around you serve to create you as an actor, leading him to ask of the Clarke material: what is it that forms these characters? The narrative about Katarina, for ex., is accompanied by an elaborate discourse on educational theory: Can it account for how being tied up awakens sexual energy? What are the assumptions about character Clarke is offering? The Stanislavskian paradigm of character, which only gets fully articulated because of the century of speculation that precedes it, is that a character is not only a life, but a continuity of life and a life that includes roads not taken. Are we in that paradigm and what is its precise shape? What are its implications for us when we work with actors on scenes with different vocabularies for understanding character? There is a discontinuity between us and the 16-17th centuries, or even the 18-19th centuries, which means that the data about earlier performance and our understanding of character must be used with caution. Our next session involved the performance of various scenes from Shrew: the tying of hands scene (which included enthralling [!] performances by our guests and a promising debut by our not-so-fearless leader Alan); the wooing scene; the road scene; and the final scene; each done more than one way to show the variety of choices available in performance. Our discussion revolved around Kate's character, touching on questions like the extent to which the scenes afford Kate opportunities as opposed to merely suppressing her (it was noted that the scenes included the two in which Kate hits people); the extent to which she chooses or embraces the actions the dialogue suggests rather than merely accommodating herself to them; also what is Petruchio's reaction at the end-shame?- exultation? Alan's session followed up on some of these questions by focusing on closure at the end of the play, using three videos to flesh out options for staging the last scene. Where does each leave us? The 1594 A Shrew presents one of the trickiest textual problems in all of Shakespeare because it contains the conclusion of the Sly framework (which the Folio does not). The standard moves in performance are either to eliminate Sly altogether or insert some of the material from A Shrew. Rarely is the Folio presented as is. One recent production eliminated the last 10 lines, making it all a dream. Alan laid out the five interpretive options on Kate's penultimate speech: 1) Shakespeare blew it-it's too long, especially for the conclusion of a comedy; write it off to inexperience; 2) Parody-the ideas are ridiculous, so the play should generate laughter at the speech; 3) A site of contestation-there is no irony, Kate and her female audience embrace it; the anti-revisionist interpretation. According to the Beane essay in The Woman's Part Kate is a shrew, a figure out of step with the patriarchal order, tamed, reclaimed for society having learned her lesson, however unpalatable that is to modern audiences; 4) Those on stage understand the speech as 3), but Kate winks to us that she's just giving the men what they want to hear; 5) same as 4) except Petruchio also understands what Kate is doing; the couple has had a breakthrough the others have not had, and we, too, are encouraged to look beyond the patriarchal world. Much of the meaning of the scene is conveyed through the hand/foot configuration, by the climactic kiss (the 3d in the play), and by the exit of Kate and Petruchio. All options should be generated by the entire play up to this point. All three videos play the speech straight, without winks to the audience: 1) BBC (early '80s; dir. Jonathan Miller, John Cleese as Petruchio. Sarah Biddell as Kate). This one is closest to the Folio version, though it ends with a hymn (Psalm 129, which Dan observed was appropriate to Miller's vision) which is Miller's invention and omits the penultimate lines about the wager. Michael observed that Kate plays her speech as revenge against Bianca, while her gestures made it seem like a performance, certainly not a lobomotized Kate. Clare said that the long speech gives Kate power. Miranda noted that the fact that the couple was seated equalized them and that their embrace was warm. Alan felt that a major choice was not having Kate and Petruchio depart, which leaves a sense of community that is totally different from the Folio where the breakthrough is with the departing couple. Another major choice is the degree of Petruchio's anxiety/confidence over what Kate will do. Cary felt the song does reprehensibly what the whole production does in forcing a harmony that is not in the script. 2) Zeffirelli (1966). He heavily cut the scene to insure that Elizabeth Taylor gets equal time, part of the star system. He omits reference to the wager, and Kate's exit and re-entry. Kate's physicality is emphasized (Kurt: esp. over the other women, forcing them in). Ellen: She doesn't give the speech as an act of obedience. Ed: This version eliminates the two commands and has Kate initiate the speech. Audrey: Kate wins by departing first. Sheila: To show this in class you must explain the off-stage relationship between Burton and Taylor. Michael: the public nature of these events is emphasized; it is much more about male one-up-manship in front of the whole community. Audrey: in the first video Kate's dignity is the source of her power, while here it is her physicality. Alan: The late action of the play follows the falconry speech which Zeffirelli omits. Audrey: He builds suspense through silence. Ed: He simplifies the audience response. Paul: There is tension over whether Kate could break back into her old self. 3) Stratford (1981; dir. Dews [?]). This tape of a theatrical performance includes the Sly material, leaves in reference to the wager, brings in Q material, without any connection between Sly and Petruchio, other than the fact that Sly has learned to tame a shrew and will proceed to tame his wife. Ellen: It is mere male wish-fulfillment to bracket the play with the Sly material. Cary: Adding the Sly plot is useful because it gives us one audience response that we reject and it unifies us against it [how to decide if it repulses the audience or licenses it to feel the same way?] Alan: the Q material is without irony. People add the Sly material at the end for the sake of closure (F starts with Sly but ends without it). In S. St. 18 (1988) Marjorie Burns defends the F version with the incomplete Sly story. Without it the point may be anti-climax. Clare, in response to Alan's question about Kate and her father, stated he wants anyone she can be happy with. Cezarija: does Kate's theatricality suggest insincerity, killing them all with kindness? Michael: The moment with Kate removing her hat read as "don't ask me," then decided if I can trust you, I'll go along. Her speech also gave her more power because of the different stage levels. Eric suggested a resemblance between Kate's appearance and early Elizabeth I. Ellen: Her speech was a female performance for the male gaze, a performance that could go on forever. Cary: The hat moment was a sign that they were trying for mutuality. Alan: The Arden Shakespeare sees Kate's speech as geared to Petruchio's question: in going beyond her charge, Kate articulates her new sense of bond with him. [Chaucer's Clerk's Tale redux?] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Saturday, January 20 We began with a session with Audrey, warming up with Tai Chi exercises [I'm told Audrey will distribute at a later date a description of each of the exercises.] Next were the sound exercises: taking the four sounds-oi, ga, pa, s-s-s-and having them driven by a variety of emotional states, first lying on the floor. The aim is to find the sound in the body and let the body move with it: What kind of creature is this sound? Then, conversation with a partner, question and answer with conflict, then react to yet others, then to fire in the world, and then to soothing rain. Next was scene work: first reading the paraphrases to one another, then getting on our feet and trying to up the stakes using our own words, then pushing and pulling one another. Some comments: Paraphrase points up how important getting some lines correctly is; pushing and pulling helps locate the tension between the characters and stimulates the intensity of the individuals; it's safer with Shakespeare's words, the paraphrase taps into scary feelings; the exercise helps discover the latent aggression in the scene; also helps discover where the character is pulling as well as pushing or where the character thinks s/he is pushing but is actually being pulled. Alan's session: We first discussed the logistics of the February presentations. We need to communicate with the Folger or with Alan re the schedule. The large group that will have Saturday and the others that are sharing Friday need to allocate the time by negotiating with one another. Also, note that there is a Thursday night session in March. With respect to the production of Shrew we had seen the previous evening Alan raised the issue of postmodern productions, e.g. those of Jo Anne Akalaitis in this country and Phyllida Lloyd in England. Alan sees these as emphasizing the fragmentary-different scenes with distinctively different looks-as vs. a linear progression. Could such an approach define a production, esp. in terms of design choices? Miranda: There is a difference between the post-modern and the gimmicky. The former reveals new things about the play, while last night's production was clutter, though fun. Ed: The postmodern reconstructs the text, sees more in it. Kurt felt the costumes in the production provided a tightly argued logic-contemporary Italian-and were not merely eclectic. Julia saw some eclecticism, even though all Italian. Ellen: The production's presentation of a slick, photogenic world is precisely what theatergoers clap for, but it's not clear how the couple fit into that world. Alan: The production picked up on the emphasis on clothing in the play, an emphasis found in other plays and in Jonson, but was the show genuinely exploring it or just conspicuous display? Clare: The production missed the human development which is in contrast to the glitz. Ellen: There was a suggestion, not developed, of Petruchio moving away from the world in his not wearing leather. Kurt: But he didn't wear leather at the beginning either; did he develop? Michael: Kate's inner value was lost at the end by putting her back into fashionable dress. Julia noted the pastoral motif of the camping scenes, but felt the absence of leather in the final tableau was not enough to distinguish the couple. Ellen compared The Duchess of Malfi-"I'm going into a wilderness"-like marriage-no map. Alan noted that inexperienced playgoers get much from costumes. He was confused by Kate's costume in the last scene; referring to the scene with the tailor and pointing out the lack of connection between the mountaintop dress and the last scene he asked, when did Kate got those final clothes? Dan: in the final speech Kate didn't know who she was speaking to; there was no sense of direction there. Clare found the emotional rush followed by conviviality jarring. Eric noted the reversal of gender roles: men in corsets, women as dominatrices; is this upside down world real or a matter of style? Kate and Petruchio were normal while the rest of the material world went nuts. Ed R. pointed out wasted possibilities like the laptop computer, Baptista as a businesswoman; because not much was done with them (e.g. dynamics between Kate and Baptista), they turned out to be gimmicky. He wanted the different moments to be linked or developed. Could have used the business as a way of orienting the different characters. Audrey noted the loss of having Baptista as a woman because of the lack of vocal command. She reported her informal audience survey, which included one respondent who was a friend of the costume designer who was asked to come and start clapping. Clare noted that several people clapped because others did: It was fun. Paul offered that clap is a social disease, but rehabilitated himself by suggesting that Baptista as a woman offers potential for a new take on patriarchy (e.g. moments like Amanda with the gentleman caller). Kate in the last speech was in an identity crisis. It made many different statements. The fragmentation of it could have been powerful precisely because of her uncertainty, it could have been an effective comment on modern life and marriage. Alan: Where applause is earned the moments are wonderful, but often moments are directed for applause, a tradition, Michael suggested, in the theater. Cary: Tableaux and actor moments historically produce applause (e.g. Maeterlinck's The Blind-there the discovery moments can generate applause otherwise rather unconnected to the play). Kurt: if the costuming were so central, the logic of the show should feed into it, but despite the applause there was a negative value put on it. Alan agreed that there was not much thought put into it, e.g. Gremio does not fit in leather. Ellen: The fashion motif is a substitute for the Induction and Epilogue. It brackets the production by asking the audience to take it as we will. Audrey: The energy went into the design and props, but the actress playing Kate in this production hated it (Miranda observed that she was wonderful in other productions.) which produced the sense of release in her last speech. The audience hushed when she went into an emotional level never reached before (The production never asked her to). Comparing this with the Henry V we saw, it's clear Michael Kahn comes to directing from an aesthetic sense which is rarer. Ed Isser: This play was a disaster; Kahn's was more problematic. Audrey: A useful way of comparing productions is to ask what is the world of this play? Bill: Our efforts to adduce interpretations from costume designs when the play is there to say something about characters shows that the production is dying at the heart. Post-modern productions work better with postmodern scripts. Cary: the economics of theater produce a very short rehearsal period that works against integrating the script with character development and design elements. The fact that the actor who played Petruchio had played the role before further diverted attention from character. Alan asked what the effect of our working with the various scenes was. Ed Isser saw more interesting choices here. Alan: What's the effect of cutting Hortensio's lines in 4.5? Bill: It puts everything on Kate without any defined focus of character. Audrey: the production showed a lack of direction. That Gremio was good (in the comic mode, but with integrity) suggests more could have been done with the others. Sheila called it sound-bite directing, frozen in that moment with no nuance. Bill: play the costume. Audrey: does it make the play more accessible to an audience that finds the language difficult? Kurt found tension between the farce mode frequently employed, while the end of the play suggested it was all more serious. Ellen: in the wooing scene she approached him until he told her it was a done deal. Cary: where does her impatience come from in the wedding? It needs to be set up in the prior scene. Paul: why is Kate frequently moping? The production didn't explore that. Julia expected a designer wedding, but it was very conventional; missed an opportunity for satire and motif development. Alan: In A Shrew Kate makes explicit that she's going to take this chance to get married, a potentially magic moment. There are trade-offs in having this in: the gain, a lot of fun, the loss, character. Michael noted the resort to extra-textual humor instead of exploiting the potential for humor in the text. The play ought to send you out with a conflicted guilty pleasure over which is a better relationship, theirs or ours. Audrey: we must decide priorities; just finding good in what you see is not good enough if you care about theater and its possibilities. Sheila: The reaction of the 6 year old was valuable; everyone else in the audience should be challenged. Audrey: It was a young audience's production. Ed Isser: My child is moved by Olivier. Kurt: The decision to use center stage for visuals pushed the action downstage, even onto stairs (Audrey: that's the strong space), which gave the production an in-your-face tone, with great potential. Clare: But the audience was blank. Miranda: The image on the wall was from Redbook magazine's search for the sexiest husband in America-that was he. After lunch, a session with Cary in the boardroom. To recap: His focus is situating the documents of performance history in the particular aesthetic, cultural and historical assumptions of that time, which is both a caution and a qualifier about using those documents. The corollary re acting/character: the way character and acting are conceived, what they mean, and how they are described (vocabulary) are connected. How we think of acting, the post-Stanislavskian paradigm, is not quite articulated, esp. re acting Shakespeare, even though extensively elaborated. Taking as an example the cruxes in Act 5 of Measure for Measure: how long before she kneels? does she accept the proposal or not? There is not much 19th century performance history, not that that history failed to answer those questions, but what is it about our assumptions about character that makes us want to see that choice as arising out of character/personality, that is a step in a character's development or through-line, that makes us say they made the wrong choice or she or the choice wasn't believable? We think of a character's path, journey, as is reflected in the verse work text books (Barton, Berry, et al.). The related issue is how I, as an actor, inhabit character? Ellen: how do we handle miraculous transformations? Julia: Lyly is out of Ovid where such transformations were standard; Shakespeare's audience was used to much more radical transformations than he offers. Ed Rocklin: Is there a paradigm shift in this regard between 1580s and 1610s? Cary: Bertram Joseph's earlier argument [Acting Shakespeare] was that Elizabethan acting was all rhetorical with no inner life. Marvin Rosenberg said this was true, but not of Shakespeare's characters. We as readers can both accept the rhetorical tradition and assimilate character to our psychological notions. The standard through-line is what do I want or fear? Transformations can be explained in terms of dropping defenses against what s/he fears in her/himself. Ellen: This is true of Angelo. Paul: The text gives us a chart of the character's choices, but in a moment of choice there are alternatives, e.g. could Bertram respond in some other way than doing what he does or saying what he says? That potential allows for what looks like a different choice late in the play. The best productions lead us to think it might be different; Hamlet might have killed Claudius at prayer tonight. Kurt: pick the other choice so you'll know what the range of choices is. Young actors' characters are often too monolithic so change is unbelievable. For example, they ignore Kate's attraction to Petruchio, but, of course, this is a psychological explanation of character. Sheila: A text-based perspective doesn't need coherence the way an audience needs it. Cary: In mainstream theater there are limits about what we can believe about a character; even where there is change, we must believe it could happen. Clare: What's the relation between actors' choices and characters' choice? Isn't the emphasis on choices itself a modern idea? Ellen: In MM the audience tracing the implications of choices is crucial. Cary referred to the common approach that everything you need to know about character in Shakespeare is in the dialogue, that the oral quality and semantic meaning carry the emotion of the actor. Long speeches don't reflect decisions already made, but working through and arriving at them; it is their emotional journey that is important, the decisions happen on, in, through, during the line. The question then is what do we do as actors to make credible characters? Kurt: Elizabethan actors just said the words is what that argument means. The counter-argument is that there was a sense of interiority. We could test this by just saying the words. Cary: One prominent approach is to just find all the oral, metrical qualities of language, not worry about character, action, feeling. The argument is against interior, emotional quality. This is the perspective of Barton, Berry, and the Players of Shakespeare series-not anti-emotion, but it is found in the lines and they (Elizabethan actors) did the same thing we are doing. Caroline: what about the realism of Burbage's Hamlet? Ellen: Every age thinks it's more natural. Paul: Performances that talk literature are different, but there is a continuity in good acting seeming natural, against strutting, fretting, and mouthing. Alan: How much is technique and how much is natural? Ed Isser: Stanislavski goes on endlessly about technique; much of the work is on externals that must be married to inner work. But the emotional grounding is worthless without a mastery of technique, which is essential. Cary: The verse can be seen as the vehicle for the important matter which is the character's inner reality, which is what makes the character credible to audience. Kurt: The issue is whether emotionality is required; technical mastery is required. Audrey: You must tell the story, but that could lead an audience nowhere. What is it the audience experiences from the story? And where does technique come from; what is the geography of emotion within an actor? Dan: You must explain the actions in modern terms though they are given in early modern terms. You must come up with new ways of explaining the language without changing the language. Cary: That is done in part by decisions the characters appear to make. How to embody this character, make this believable? We invent an inner life, journey, set of understandings, etc., or we cut. To do the play is to solve character; to say the lines organically. Ed Rocklin: In the 1610 Oxford performance of Othello the most moving moment was Desdemona's death. Marlowe is considered inferior possibly because he wasn't trying to do the same thing. Perhaps Shakespeare was part of a paradigm shift, which means that the early plays cannot be read the same way. Audrey: What about Brechtian alienation? Marlowe's characters are sympathetic in one scene and different in the next. Julia: That is another way of looking at the play, without a through-line, recalling Aristotle's point that there can be plot without character, but not vice-versa, a strange idea for us. Audrey: Could we examine Shakespeare in this new way, with last night's performance only a partial step toward this? Cary: is it even possible for us to conceive of a different mode of performance? We work within a shared sense of character, motivation, psychology-the emotionalist mode of performance. There are modes of acting (e.g. the Method) that insufficiently channel character through the dialogue. How to address the question of why the Duke in MM does what he does? Structuralist approach? Emotionalist, etc., or by reference to his childhood? Earlier view was based on a set of biological deterrninants that did not translate into a credible understanding of character. Our emotionalist view fails at times to work in the channel of Shakespeare's language. Technique can work to channel emotional energy through the play's language, but if that's true, what do we mean when we say we are responding to Shakespeare's signals? Can we operate within bur paradigm on a reconstructed Globe? And, if we are all reading with spectacles, how does that affect our understanding of historical material (an issue W.W. Worthen raises). Ed R.: There is an analogy to Hayden White here, in that every discipline talks as if other disciplines have some truth. Worthen's point is that it is not just Shakespeare's text and character, but the understanding and conventions of acting that are interrogable as well. The risk is deconstructive paralysis; actors are particularly susceptible to standing on some firm ground. Ellen: Inquiry is less attack-oriented than interrogation. Bob: The paradigm itself is not monolithic. Cary: Can we begin to see limitations to our paradigm? Shakespeare's scripts come out of a different paradigm which I endorse assimilating. The answer is self-awareness. Ed Isser: My need is to make the audience never accept the end. Ellen: Part of the point of reading old plays is to make us think different things about our issues. Difference can enlarge our minds and that should be shared with the audience. For example, it bothers me we can't believe in conversion. Cary: Can we use the signals of the script to fully dramatize Bertram's character as a 20th century conversion? Michael: Bertram got what he wanted all along, i.e. to be like dad; he gets an heir-it has nothing to do with her. Ellen: Audiences have trouble seeing him as a husband to her. Miranda: That resolution is troubling because it makes the play all about Bertram, male desire, male need, while it is also about Helena, about pure, unabashed female desire. Overemphasis on his in a production could efface hers. Michael: Are we as prepared to be as upset about her desire as his? Clare: Who is "we"? What is the paradigm, or single audience mind? There is a range of responses. Alan: Worthen takes on one claim of performance criticism-the claim to have located the "truth" of the play in performance. The energy of deconstruction matches the truth claims being attacked; modulation of the truth claim will avoid paralysis. Cary: We should celebrate the way we're talking about character, in part because it will make us self-conscious in our teaching. Because we are making texts with our assumptions we should be cautious about the truth claims. Alan: Occasionally we need to look at the spectacles. Ed Isser: The choice tree for actors means (Cary) that every performance will only bear a distant relationship to the "ur meaning" of the text. Julia: The director is a relatively recent arrival; because s/he thinks about structure, the actors are freed to focus on character. Cary: We must look at performance history as an effort to understand the aesthetic assumptions it embodies. He recommended Shakespeare: Theory and Performance, ed. James Bulman (Routledge, 1996), esp. the Worthen and Knowles' essays which look at actor training. Cary's essay deals with performance scholarship and its links to 1970s performance. After the presentation of scene 2.5 from All's Well we had discussion. Michael: I try to impress on my class how important the audience's job is; the actors' is over; experience has taught me that the class is most invigorating when I turn it over to the class. Re response to scenes: What did you learn? About relationships. How? Trial and error and comments from the observer. What do we know about this from the text? e.g. the ages of the parties. How to play that, what theatrical vocabulary is available for that? Another facet: what's public and what's private, and how to decide that? Mark Rose in Scenic Design in Shakespeare views scenes as diptyches and triptyches in terms of the sections of the scene; that there are two different actions that comment on one another. Here both are attempts to separate Bertram and Parolles; in both halves two people are fighting over Bertram. Re the kiss: No edition includes it. We saw three different interpretations of that moment: 1) a spark in Bertram which Parolles sees and so breaks it up; something in Bertram attracts him to Helena and only Parolles prevents it; 2) Bertram is colder, which is why there is no kiss. No suggestion of Parolles' intervening in the Bertram-Helena relationship, because there is no need for it; 3) [sorry folks I missed it.] Handout describes a number of versions of the to kiss or not-to-kiss moment. In a 1973 Oregon Shakespeare Festival production (a production in which Parolles and Bertram have a homosexual relationship) Helena blew a kiss and Parolles intercepted it. There are two facets: knowing the range of options and what to do with that knowledge. Michael: How to go from the classroom to scholarship? His article on the play grew out of his performing Shakespeare. Another is on Parolles' presence; it has a big impact on the relationships between Bertram and Helena, and Parolles and Bertram. Three options: 1) Bertram loves Helena but it is buried and Parolles' presence keeps it buried; 2) Bertram's love is apparent and Parolles prevents its expression; 3) Bertram doesn't love Helena at all. His scholarship tries to identify the really important choices, and takes two approaches: Look at what productions have done in the past, and find labs where you can experiment with scenes expressing various understandings. [The following is a checklist of other problems in this scene the staging must address, from Michael's notes: Begin with the entrance? How to make sense of the sir/tailor sequence? How deal with asides? "I think [not] so." What does Parolles do during the Helena/Bertram interview? Who speaks, "Where are my other men? Monsieur, farewell"? How does Bertram change after Helena leaves the stage? What kind of exit do Bertram and Parolles make?] Paul pointed out that in the scene Helena is now in upper-class dress which may lead to a new perception by Bertram; there may also be an earlier moment where her dress was an issue. We dealt with the textual cruxes by looking at what our editions said and taking the easier reading, the one we felt could be played most easily. What are the consequences for the final scene of the choices in this scene? A cold Bertram here may not be recoverable. Should we make easier choices? If Bertram has an attraction, how does the arc of the play change? Historically, productions have heaped Bertram's problems on Parolles and he can therefore be recuperated by separating him from Parolles. The problem is his most despicable conduct comes in Parolles' absence, though his behavior there can be accounted for because the stakes are higher for him. Earlier he has no such excuse, but he is being forced into this marriage to a social inferior. The action repeatedly pulls Bertram down and lifts Helena up; the Countess and King endorse her, mitigating the problem of social difference. What difference does the embodiment of Maudlin as ugly make to the end of the play? Michael: He's marrying her for mercenary motives. Marriage in Shakespeare is often sealed between men, not with women, but often not communicated in performance, which typically dwells on love. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes and Reflections 23-24 February 1996 by Dan Colvin Friday, February 23 Although it has become customary to reconvene at 8:45 a.m. to begin our monthly Institute meetings, it has by no means become routine. This month was no exception, for we were once again anxious to catch up on our lives since last meeting. But we soon realized that the 9:00 a.m. starting time was one to be more honored in its observance than in its breach--we gathered at 8:15 for an 8:30 a.m. session. As we talked, it became evident that all of us were excited--and a bit anxious--about this session, the one in which we participants were to be responsible for almost all aspects. Audrey's familiar call for us to move into the theatre came at 9:00. We entered, picked up a variety of materials (including the minutes of January 19-20 which Bob and Eric had completed so ably), and we were off. As soon as we had formed our circle on the stage, Alan provided opening announcements and took care of logistical matters. Cezarija volunteered to take notes for the March and the April sessions, noting that she was on sabbatical and "had more free time." After the rest of us had expresses our gratitude and envy, Bill said he would be the respondent in March, and Sheila agreed to take that role in April. Alan noted the handouts he had provided and commented on logistical matters: 1. We need a way of socializing with the five ACTER members, one which will allow for the comfort of smokers and non-smokers. A compromise seemed to be a nonsmoking beginning for our social time, followed by a time for those who smoke or can tolerate smoke. 2. We need to send a notation of our scenes along with copies of our scenes to Rebecca at the Folger. These will be made available for the ACTER members, who will be working with us on our scenes next month. 3. Alan graciously offered to provide us with recommendations or supporting documentation for personnel matters, noting, of course, that he will be able to speak about only that which he knows personally. (We assume he will not share with others some of the more humiliating or embarrassing moments from the Institute.) 4. The performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Kennedy Center would be at 7:30 that night; those taking the Metro would meet in the hotel lobby at 6:45. 5. On the Institute bulletin board was a review of Bob Lane's recent--and critically acclaimed--performance in The Scarlet Letter. Having seen Bob act before us, we were not at all surprised that the writer commented on his passion and intensity. 6. The writing prompt for tonight's play would be the familiar one: "Choose one dramatic choice in the play and discuss its significance." Audrey reminded the participants that they should bring to the next meeting two items: a poster representing the interior/exterior of their character and a prop for their character. These will be available for the ACTER personnel. Caroline then announced that Miranda had been asked to write program notes for future Shakespeare Theatre productions, an appointment well-deserved, to be sure. Miranda and Caroline began what was to be an intense, informative, and exciting two-day session, one which would be characterized by great displays of imagination, team-teaching, and collaboration. After providing handouts which showed the rich diversity of material available, Miranda announced that the two would be discussing how to present Othello and The Merchant of Venice in urban settings where there is significant diversity. Miranda spoke first about the challenge of teaching Othello on a black campus. She said that she approaches the drama not as being a racist play but rather as being a play about racism. She noted the tradition of racist criticism (for example, Coleridge) which continues even through modern editions (for example, Ridley's Arden). Her pedagogical context enables her to ask important questions about the play, she said: "Who owns Shakespeare?" "How relevant is Shakespeare or Othello today?" "How do we deal with homoerotic literature or homoerotic elements in literature?" Caroline continued by telling an anecdote of a Latino student who, when asked why she was taking Caroline's course, said that all educated people should know Shakespeare; but after she got to the point in the course when she had to do an oral interpretation of a passage, she said that she needed to drop the course because she couldn't "speak" Shakespeare. The anecdote, Caroline said, said much about her situation at Cal State LA: it is a very diverse campus, and the students see Shakespeare as a talisman to help them achieve their middle-class dream. Thus, she noted, she needed to provide more "traditional" approaches and material; while recent theory needed to be marginalized, she still had to be sure that Shakespeare did not become an object of idolatry. She emphasized that it is important to elicit and to affirm student goals and to discuss cultural issues (for example, assimilation or the problematics of cultural dominance). The performance orientation of the course allows her to consider with the students the matter of the "performability of culture." Caroline shared two of her teaching strategies: all students are involved in oral interpretation of the plays, and all students are required to create a "screenplay" in which they "rewrite" a portion of a play. The screenplay helps students learn how "open" a text really is. In the screenplay, students must make all the relevant decisions: props, costumes, casting, camera angles, cutting, etc.; any time period was acceptable as long as students could justify their choice; and students must submit a one-page explanation/justification for the concept of the screenplay. Miranda moved into the video portion of their presentation by introducing the two video versions of Othello we were about to see: the Olivier production and the Suzman production. She noted that she had chosen to present clips of 4.1 (the "fit") for three reasons: 1) the performative opportunities for Othello, 2) the flexibility afforded Iago, and 3) the potential for racial stereotypes. After we viewed the two scenes, Miranda led us in discussion. Quickly it was noted and affirmed that performing the play in blackface is now anathema. Audrey suggested that the Olivier version is a "stagy" production, while Paul commented that we are seeing a "great actor from another time showing his technique." Alan reminded us that the focus on the epileptic fit can be a problem in terms of audience response. After Miranda remarked on Suzman's ability to emphasize Iago's racism, Clare suggested using the Olivier version with the Leavis essay (F. R. Leavis, "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero," in The Common Pursuit [1952]) to show how Olivier based his antiheroic version of the character on scholarship. Enlarging our sense of diversity, Sheila noted that her students resist seeing the play as being about race, possibly because they choose Emory instead of the black colleges available around Atlanta. Miranda reminded the participants of the difference between non-traditional casting (which attempts to make a comment on the role) and color-blind casting (which makes no such comment)--See Miranda Johnson-Haddad, "The Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, 1990-91" Shakespeare Quarterly 42,4 (1991) 472-84; note especially her footnote comments: "I am here using the term 'nontraditional casting' as distinct from 'colorblind' or 'genderblind' casting, the distinction being that nontraditional casting involves casting an actor of a race or sex not usually associated with a given role in order to make a point about that role and/or to shed new light upon the play. In colorblind or genderblind casting, the actor playing a given role may be of a race or sex not usually associated with that role, but the director is not attempting to make a point about the role or the play. In other words, we are meant to notice and reflect upon a nontraditional casting choice, while we are meant to 'ignore' a colorblind or genderblind casting choice. (Given the central themes of Othello, it seems to me that any casting choice that involves race will in most cases be perceived as nontraditional rather than colorblind.) Miranda and Caroline then broke the participants into four groups for their exercise: two on The Merchant of Venice and two on Othello; each group was to cast the play and to consider what concerns were involved in casting. After the groups reported on their conclusions and their responses to the assignment, Miranda and Caroline suggested that such assignments help students consider how they think about race (and about the "other"). The group raised other issues: can there be a colorblind casting of Othello? how do we construct our identity? how is the matter of race and/or diversity related to the language of the text? Caroline asked the group for feedback regarding their concern over diversity (in all its manifestations) and the teaching of Shakespeare. After our morning break, Cezarija and Bill were the next to take center stage for their consideration of using videos for teaching Shakespeare. Cezarija introduced the session by telling us that she was interested in the scene she would be showing us (Twelfth Night 4.2 - the "dark box") for two different reasons: she had trouble visualizing it, but she also wondered why Shakespeare would use this particular kind of humiliation. Using Leggatt's suggestion (Shakespeare's Comedy of Love. London: Methuen, 1976) that Malvolio is a metaphor for people trapped in love, Cezarija said that she would opt for a balance of pathos and humor in the scene. Having laid the foundation, she then showed the three versions of the scene: 1) the 1969 production directed by John Sichel, 2) the 1979 production directed by John Gorrie (the BBC production), and 3) the 1988 production directed by Kenneth Branagh. Discussion on the three noted the following: #1--was lighthearted, with the dungeon being far from dark; #2--didn't explore what happened to Feste (Paul commented, from his production, about the importance of reactions in a scene; he suggested that the scene is not about imprisonment but about Malvolio regaining love.); #3--Alan noted that much depends on how the audience feels about practical jokes, saying that to a great extent the attitudes changed at the beginning of our century. Cezarija noted that in comedy there is always some pain. Cezarija closed by asking the participants for other questions beyond those listed on the sheet she distributed. Bill then moved to the second half of the presentation: a consideration of cinemagraphic techniques (vocabulary), for which he provided a handout describing various effects. For his demonstration, Bill chose to use King Lear in part because various versions of the pay are easily available on video; in particular he chose 3.4. After summarizing the Olivier version (mainly because time constraints would not allow him to show the clip), noting the kinds of low shots, billboarding, aggrandizing close-ups, "classical cutting," and overcoming sound characteristics of that version, Bill introduced the BBC version. In this production, only two camera placements were afforded (A and B), at times producing a humorous effect (for example, playing the game "How many actors can we fit in this frame?"). Rather, he noted, cinemagraphic techniques should support acting and directorial choices. The Brook version, on the other hand, uses external techniques to show what is going on internally. In this production, framing is quite important, and the sound never obliterates the verse of the play. Bill also noted that material had been placed on the lens in order to distort reality (the focus of the camera) For our lunch time enjoyment (and fearing that we had nothing to occupy our time), the Folger staff invited us to hear Alan Young speak on "The Folger Hamlets," part of his larger project, "Hamlet and the Visual Arts - 1706-1900." Professor Young, providing a beautiful and intriguing graphic display, discussed how his private database had been transformed into a public tool for documenting presentations and representations of Hamlet and Hamlet throughout the last few centuries. Noting that the database provides a means for him both to store and to trace visual material documenting the popular reception and interpretation of plays, he explained, with examples, the nature of the particular fields he has established and the means of indexing the material. Users of the database can search, for example, using either the Riverside citation or the Hinman TLN or can search by actors, directors, or characters. After our lunch break we returned to the theatre for our session with the Measure for Measure group (Ellen, Edward, Ed, and Dan). Ellen opened the session by telling the participants that this session would entail performing various scenarios from Measure for Measure, scenarios which would later be juxtaposed with other exercises. Various acting groups were formed and assigned interpretations: for 1.1, Kurt was to play the Duke; Sheila, Escalus; and Bob, Angelo; for 2:3, Tom was to be the Provost; Miranda, the Duke; and Julia, Juliet; for 2.4, Bill was to be Angelo and Clare was to play Isabella; for 3.2 Eric took the part of the Duke and Cezarija played Lucio; for 4.3, Paul was the Duke and Caroline played Isabella. At their request, Alan and Audrey were also assigned parts; they were also given 2.4, with Alan probing the complexities and Audrey confronting the conflicting aspects of Isabella. After the groups had rehearsed their scenes, they performed the various interpretations before the entire assembly, much to the delight and the enlightenment of all. Then, all participated in a discussion of their experience. In reference to the presentations of 1.1, it was noted that sometimes the most interesting interpretation of a scene or of an acting moment is not necessarily the best choice for the play as a whole. In conjunction with that insight was the awareness, not new but still significant, that the way in which 1.1 is set up allows the audience to see the play as a testing of power. Many noted in regard to 2.3 that there was an interesting Juliet (Julia's "southern charm" had transformed Juliet into a debutante) made possible here; it was also noted that this scene sets up 3.1. The actors involved in 2.4 noted that there was a real problem in doing only part of a scene (which is strong) when that part provides an Isabella who is not strong at that moment. That insight reminded us that in choosing short scenes or parts of scenes, it is important to allow a kind of "metonymic action" to take place, with even the small portion actually reflecting the whole scene. Those acting in 3.2 noted that they found it hard to play the opposites--it was much easier and more natural to play it as if Lucio was a liar than as if the Duke actually was as profligate as Lucio said he was. The opposite was true of those acting in 4.3--they found no resistance in either assigned interpretation. Edward provided the transition to the final section by leading a discussion of the kneelings and pardons in Act 5, an exercise based on Maguire's discussion of mandatory and optional action. Participants noted for Edward where there were possible kneelings in Act 5, and noted the causes for such kneelings (e.g., the entry of the Duke, requests of the Duke, pleadings for pardons); for each Edward listed the location and cause on a chart. Then the group listed the pardons (though there was some question of exactly what constituted a pardon). Once the chart was completed, Edward gave the group a verbal prompt--which could be a writing prompt for a class--"One thing that is becoming clear to me about this scene is ..." Clare observed that if the Duke isn't pardoned, the play ends with the Duke in charge--a reading she wouldn't like. Paul saws that the kneelings and pardons could be read as a restoration of order, but that post-modern readings seem to obviate that possibility. Audrey suggested that there could be a link to the pardons in The Tempest, a suggestion that because the Duke learns there is a new day of law coming. The final section of the group's presentation was a group reading of Act 5, with parts assigned to all participants. (The original intention had been to have the various pairings from earlier perform the "forgiveness" scene from Act 5, but time did not allow that.) While all noted the excellent reading of stage directions by Alan, many commented on the difficulty of doing a "cold" reading from the folio as well as the fact that just reading the words isn't enough. The experience again raised the matter of how Isabella could ask for pardon at the end, and brought agreement that the point at which Isabella speaks for Angelo could be on of the most moving in all of Shakespeare. The Friday evening play for this session was A Midsummer Night's Dream presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Kennedy Center. As we were to discover later, the production was to be one of the most interesting we had yet seen during the Institute, and one which would divide us along unfamiliar lines. Saturday, February 24 Saturday morning returned us to a more humane schedule, with coffee and pastries at 8:45 a.m. and the sessions beginning at 9:00. After we had assembled, Alan announced that for the March session the ACTER group would not be able to meet with us after 3:30 in the afternoon. Therefore, on Friday we will work with Audrey on some Macbeth matters and on Saturday we will discuss how we will be putting all of our material in order in May and how we intend to print everything. A World Wide Web site is one possibility for making our work accessible. Kurt was next to present his project, one for which we had been asked to memorize a sonnet the night before (after we had written our response to A Midsummer Night's Dream). He introduced his segment by noting what we had been thinking about for most of our time together: the problems of performance exercises. They are, he reminded us, quite time consuming, and they tend to ignore contextual issues. Kurt had developed this exercise out of his scansion work with his students. Developing Barton's exercise (Robert Barton, Style for Actors [Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1993]) of "Queen for a Day," Kurt combined cultural contexts (an awareness of the significance of monarchy and its prerogatives), scansion (using sonnets, which were more regular than most of the dramatic verse), and performance by having students imagine they were appearing before the monarch (Queen Elizabeth or King James, as the case may be) to offer the gifts of a sonnet. In order to accomplish this, Kurt created a "protocol" for an audience with the monarch and then had a colleague from the English Department, Dr. Braddon, come to class dressed as Queen Elizabeth, the room having been rearranged to "defamiliarize" the context. Then Dr. Braddon (accompanied by her students) entered and held court. Kurt noted that the exercise emphasized how "gendered" the court was and how ethnocentric modern American students' notion of egalitarianism is. With that introduction, Kurt then moved us into the exercise, opening the curtain to the inner stage to "discover" (oh, how he resembled Prospero!) Queen Elizabeth and her lady in waiting, Lady Clara. The group stood immediately and did obeisance until Her Majesty allowed us to be seated. Eric was the first to present himself to the Queen, providing a perfect rendition of his sonnet; Clare and Bill followed in suit, with the Queen commenting on what wonderful subjects she had. Ed was the final person to make a presentation, reciting a passage from Measure for Measure. The session closed with a madrigal--The Triumph of Oriana (1601). Julia moved us into the next segment, a consideration of the relationship between Renaissance music and performance. To begin, Julia handed each of us a score from John Bennet's "All Creatures Now," each with a single part marked. Julia asked us to listen to the tape of the piece and to answer each of the following questions: 1) Who is your character? 2) What are your emotions? 3) What is the relationship among the characters? and 4) Who is the leading character? After we had done our assignment, enjoying the piece greatly as we listened, we discussed the parts, and considered the issue of polyphony--the significance of music using many voices/lines and exploiting the interplay and collaboration of the various singers (how like our Institute!). Julia suggested that polyphony can be seen as a paradigm for thinking about Renaissance drama. Using Love's Labor's Lost 5.2.195-235 as an example, Julia assigned four voices to the parts of the King, Berowne, Rosiline, and the Princess, asking, "Pretend you don't know the play. What do you know about the characters and about the dynamics?" After the reading, we discussed the sense of mirroring and the playfulness of the scene. Julia noted the importance of the masque form here: characters are masked, pretending to be other, but the artifice is obvious and delightful. The entire group then chose Julia and Paul to read lines 211-229. We noted that the steady beat of the play is similar to that of polyphony, where each individual has only his or her own part, thereby necessitating a sound structure as well as a sense of give and take (and a good ability to listen). Julia here reminded us that many of the boy actors were trained in choirs and took that training to the theatre when they acted. Next Julia provided us with Tallis' "Loquebantur variis linguis," a pre-Reformation piece, and asked us to consider what religious ramifications we noted in the music; many noted the sense of individuality and polyphony--an anticipation of the Reformation. In Love's Labor's Lost 4.3 Julia noted the similarity of the scene's structure and that of a madrigal, suggesting that finally the play is about unanimity. Julia finally argued, as opposed to Cary Mazer's point, that we might think about character in terms of a musical line--character residing in relationship rather than in psychology. She ended her session with a beautiful piece: Gibbons' "What is our life?" (1612). Following Julia's wonderful presentation, the group discussed the implications of the material from both Julia and Kurt. It was noted that we would benefit from looking at Kristen Linklater, Freeing Shakespeare's Voice, (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1991). Audrey reminded us that iambic is the meter of the heartbeat, and is not noted on television very often. Alan observed how well the musical paradigm fit Lyly; he also suggested that the hierarchical mode revealed in Kurt's exercise gives insight into the end of Measure for Measure. Paul said that role-playing often leads students to ask questions about context, for understand roles demands such knowledge. Once again we commented on the problem of time--that we never have enough of it in our classes (or in the Institute). Kurt noted how sonnets change when a particular auditor is produced in a play. There was general agreement in the group that it is important to understand the masque form--the intimacy between audience and actor--and that Kurt's exercise is most helpful for getting the students to understand the power structure in Shakespeare's day. Kurt emphasized that he intends his exercise to replace other (and many) items (e.g., a lecture on scansion, a consideration of politics, and a focus on the nature of Shakespeare's company), thereby partially obviating the matters of coverage and time. Audrey reminded us that you can break a class into groups, each focusing on one aspect of an interdisciplinary approach (e.g., music, dance, food). After our morning break we gathered to perform our ritual dismemberment of the play we had seen the night before--A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ed, who had wisely noted of the production that "It wasn't Richard II!" emphasized that acting is to do, not to say, and noted that 3.2 was solved by actors acting. Several commented on the use of doors: Miranda--they didn't make sense, but they were used well; Caroline--perhaps they were an entrance into the imagination; Edward--the rising doors didn't make sense, but they worked; Clare--good tribute to Brook's Dream. Eric thought there was a significant gap between the directing and the design. Caroline expressed disappointment with Egeus, especially at the end. Bill and Alan agreed on the value of holding back on the performance of the Pyramus and Thisbe play, for it gives meaning to Hippolyta's line ("Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man." [5.1.290]) Edward observed that the three endings were tied together, not just repeated. The group then discussed the trajectory of Oberon's laughter concerning Titania's votaress's death; many felt that the laugh, though difficult to bear, provided an opportunity for Oberon to grow during the play. For Audrey, the magic of the play never came through in the production--it was "pretty" and choreographed, but not really effective. Sheila agreed, saying that she saw a good deal of talent on stage, but "got no spirit from it." Bob thought that the play aimed at the theme of "men changing," and he felt that even with its flaws the change was evident. Ellen disliked the proportions on stage, sensing that the actors were dwarfed and therefore became less significant. Paul noted that the actors didn't respond to their environment, but Kurt expressed joy about how the play was wonderfully "presentational." Eric, however, remained troubled at how "safe" the play was, and Ellen felt that Puck's statement ("If we shadows have offended") was ludicrous, for there was no way they could have offended. At that point, Alan asked if we could explain the split in our group, for the lines were not drawn between English and Theatre people, but no one could come up with a sufficient explanation. Sheila noted that text and image were at odds in the production. Miranda agreed by suggesting that nightmares were lurking beneath the surface of the play, but in the production they only lurked. Edward observed that the play ends with people not revealing their dreams (i.e., they don't see the relationship to their own lives). Clare returned to the matter of the split in our reactions and our discussion by saying that it was not so much that we were talking about a play or a production but rather how the production affected us. The conversations turned, thus, to the "hermeneutics of suspicion," and to the matter that to be enchanted is to be enchained, with Kurt encouraging the group to think about Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996). Bill ended the time by observing, with general agreement, that this was the best discussion we had had thus far. After lunch, the "Syllabi Group" took over the presentations. Sheila began by talking about her material from the Emory British Studies Program. She noted that since she had to work up a syllabus for our Institute project, she decided to work on the course she will actually be teaching. She distributed the syllabus for the course and explained the nature of the course and the constraints of the structure. Since the class will be meeting in England, the students will pretty much be limited to whatever books they can carry; consequently, the use of the Riverside Shakespeare is not possible. Moreover, since she will not know ahead of time what video material will be available, she will need to remain fairly flexible. The class will be meeting for eleven times, with each class meeting being two hours. The group will be seeing three Stratford plays (As You Like It, Macbeth, and Troilus and Cressida), with three classes on each; they will also watch an entire video on each of those plays. Her intention is for the students to be as interactive as possible with the text; she will work to move between the text and theoretical/critical issues. Sheila noted (with many of us voicing our envy) that her students generally were quite motivated, and thus she expected them to come to the sessions quite well prepared. Her As You Like It work will have students focusing on a particular character; in their consideration of Macbeth they will balance theoretical and dramatic issues; and with Troilus and Cressida she will attempt to teach students to read Shakespeare in a new way, especially by using Valerie Traub's essay. The course is designed to make the students raise the important issues themselves; to that end, they will consider, finally, the role and status of Shakespeare in our culture. Along with a final writing project, Sheila will probably have the students add a "How I wrote this paper" appendix, allowing them to consider there marginal matters that may be of some import to them. Paul continued the presentation by providing some background on Marlboro College. The only requirement there, he said, is that the students be able to write well. Interdisciplinary courses are quite popular at Marlboro now, so he constructed a seminar using interdisciplinary approaches to Twelfth Night. Paul led the group through his syllabus, noting some of the possibilities in each area. He also emphasized the a real problem with an interdisciplinary approach such as his--and with this syllabus--is that there is often not sufficient time to give anything more than a cursory investigation of topics. Moreover, this course is intended to foster basic skills (e.g., research, writing, critical thinking), and thus is to become "all things to all people." Clare concluded the examination of syllabi by presenting material from her classes. She works from a collaborative approach, having the students produce a dramaturg's book (she provided a wonderful example of one from the Colorado Shakespeare Festival) as their major project. In this case, students would be working with Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. At the beginning of the project, the class is divided into five groups: director, critical historians, production historians, designers, and "teachers." Students have time in class to work on their projects, as well as needing to go to the library to consult reserve material. After Clare's presentation, others talked briefly about their courses. Audrey had had her classes research each play and then bind the material together to give to the director. Eric has each member come to a collaborative meeting with one image (to be evaluated at the end). In a kind of brainstorming, people noted that there are video records of plays available at Lincoln Center, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Stratford, Ontario. Following the afternoon break, Eric, Bob, and Tom began their consideration of Shakespeare's language. Treating us as his class, Eric explained that he would be dealing with a common fear --the fear of Shakespeare's language. Before the actual instruction began, Eric gave us a "warm-up" exercise (we were all longing for one, since we were not able to experience Audrey's tortures during the February session): we were to walk about the theatre while Eric called out numbers, "one" telling us to walk as slowly as possible and "five" having us walk as quickly as possible; when we met someone, we were to look at that person and do a deep-knee-bend. After regaining our breath, we moved into the meter exercises. Eric had us then move across the stage, emphasizing the right foot, and reciting "I am" five times, reversing direction for the next set, all the time keeping track of our pulse by feeling the carotid artery. He next had us do an exercise which stresses the use of punctuation as well as helping students drive to the end of a line: he had prepared cards with unfamiliar Shakespearean text on them; the first reader was given the card and had to read the selection, followed by the second and then the third reader (how quickly that third reader learned to understand and speak the lines). Bob next provided us with examples of how he deals with language in his classes. He recommended for our use Randal Robinson, Unlocking Shakespeare 's Language (Urbana, NCTE-ERIC, 1988). One of his major goals, he told us, is to show the students that they do indeed have the capacity to understand Shakespeare's language. (For his more advanced students, he noted, this exercise gave them a means to talk about Shakespeare's language and about language in general.) Using the opening Prologue from Henry V, Bob talked about how to go beyond teaching students about traditional matters of language structure to talking about why and how rhetorical structures are important. Discussing his checklist "Shakespeare's Language--Opportunities and Problems," Bob pointed out how he deals with matters such as sentences, diction, verse, words, punctuation, pacing, sound, styles, and body language. Tom concluded the group's consideration of Shakespeare's language. Before he began his presentation, however, he passed around a copy of the new book Shakespeare on the Screen, while people hurriedly copied down bibliographical information. Then he focused our attention on Titania's "forgeries of jealousy" speech from A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1 as a good passage to use in a classroom situation. Tom distributed copies of the speech and had us note (as students) what words we knew, thought we knew, thought we did not know, and were sure we did not know. As a classroom exercise, he would have the students then get into groups to prepare lists of words the group had marked, eventually producing a class "master list" which would indicate familiar and unfamiliar words. Tom then distributed his own master list (created during an enforced stay with the OED) in which he noted difficult words, its line number, its definition in the passage, its common modern meaning, and an indication of why it might be confusing to students today. Finally, after helping us through the passage, he showed four video versions of the speech--the 1935 Max Reinhardt version, Peter Hall's 1968 version, the 1982 Joseph Papp production (from Shakespeare in the Park), and the 1981 BBC production. Unfortunately, by this time our time was over and we retired to our hotel to prepare for the evening performance, a Shakespeare Theatre production of All's Well That Ends Well. As it turned out, the production lent itself to much discussion, and Kelly Magillis's performance could only be called remarkable. And so we were off, to prepare for another session of "Shakespeare Examined Through Performance," this time in March. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments on the Minutes 23-24 February 1996 by Tom Gandy "Here we are all by day; by night we are hurled By dreams, each into a several world." - Robert Herrick Friday Morning (Early Friday Morning) So here we were all again at the Folger this February, 1996, with a session that each of us, it seems, faced with at least some degree of trepidation. We bore sole responsibility for the February meeting, with Audrey and Alan relaxing and, one would hope, enjoying the weekend. The meeting began with a stimulating presentation by Caroline and Miranda about teaching Othello and Merchant of Venice in urban settings. This discussion was of considerable interest to me for a rather odd reason. I teach in a rural area of the country, and though the community has a large minority population--mostly African-American but increasingly Hispanic--few of these students make it through public schools and two years of lower-division work before they get to ETSU-Texarkana, which is an upper-level institution. The issues of race nevertheless weigh rather heavily when I teach Othello. My mostly white classes are sensitive to the issue of race in that play, and when we see productions where the cast of a play is racially mixed, especially those which are cast without concern for color, they inevitably have questions. Miranda presented us with one possible way to approach Othello: Tackle the problem head-on and teach it as a play about racism. Discussions, she says, can become lively when the play is looked at from this perspective. Who "owns" Shakespeare, anyway? Where does the potential for racism reside? Two video clips of 4.1, one from Olivier's 1965 Othello and one from a 1987 South African production, help Miranda bring this issue into sharper perspective. A repugnantly racist Iago in the South African version taunts Othello as he suffers a seizure. "Dost thou mock me" can take on a very different sort of meaning, can't it? Caroline has many Hispanic students who feel that Shakespeare is culturally important to people striving to become active participants in our society. These students may feel that they cannot "speak" Shakespeare because of their accent. I have the same problem in east Texas, with native born Texans, so Caroline's presentation was both relevant and somewhat amusing to me: Everything she said was directly applicable to my students, but I had to mentally substitute "good ol' boys" ("good ol' persons?) for "Hispanic." First- or second-generation college students have a lot in common with first- or second-generation immigrants, it would seem. Caroline spoke of the ways Shakespeare has sometimes been "used" by society, either in reality or in the popular imagination, as an upper-crust phenomenon. As one teaching approach to Merchant of Venice, Caroline requires students to write a five or six-page screenplay for one scene. Students can set the scene in any time period, but they must write a brief explanation of why they made the choices they made in their screenplay. Their screenplay can focus on either gender or racism as an issue. Miranda and Caroline also gave us an exercise in which students, in groups of four, do an intentionally provocative casting of Merchant or Othello. Afterwards, students work on understanding stereotypes (gender, race, or otherwise) based on their casting exercise. As with Miranda's presentation, the question in many ways comes down to "Who owns Shakespeare." I can't wait to teach Othello this April! Friday Morning (Less early) Cezarija and Bill concentrated on using video in the classroom. Cezarija showed versions of Twelfth Night 4.2, in which the imprisoned Malvolio is visited by Feste disguised as Sir Topas. Cezarija's interest in the scene stemmed from the particularly cruel form of the humiliation inflicted on Malvolio. The different video scenes showed that, through staging, the audience's reaction to the practical joke can be manipulated to vary the relative amounts of humor and pathos elicited. Cezarija uses the scene in her classes to raise many questions concerning the play. Bill distributed an outline for an ambitious work-in-progress on Shakespeare in film.. He used video of a scene from Lear to illustrate camera techniques in filming. The BBC version (dir. Jonathan Miller), and the Peter Brook version produce strikingly different effects. The almost ludicrous limitations of a two-camera approach imposed on the BBC version as opposed to the Brook version, in which the camera technique is carefully managed in order to reflect directorial decisions about the play. I would like to encourage Bill (in his spare time) to hasten this project to its completion. The outline looks terrific, and we who have heard Bill speak on the subject are familiar with the depth of his enthusiasm for and knowledge of the subject. Lunch in the Boardroom Alan Young talked about his project involving the visual representations of Hamlet in the Folger collection. This is a major part of a larger work Young is doing on visual representations of Hamlet from 1709-1900. These still representations--paintings, watercolors, photos, etc.-- can provide modern audiences with a remarkable view of Shakespeare in performance. Verbal descriptions of staging can only go so far in letting us know what an early production was like. Projects such as this will provide generations of students with a window into the plays previously inaccessible to them, or practically speaking, to any but the most devoted and most persistent, such as Young. His presentation reminded me how greatly we are indebted to researchers such as Alan Young (or our own "Alan," for that matter), and to institutions such as the Folger, which has made its collection accessible to him, and through him, to all of us. Early Friday Afternoon Measure for Measure has a lot to say about power. The play's last scene stresses the formal, official aspects of pubicly asking for pardon and publicly receiving it. The scene is virtually athletic when looked at in terms of its many possible kneelings and risings. Almost everyone in the scene does one or the other. Ellen, Dan, Edward, and Ed worked with us on this difficult play. During the month prior to this session I had often thought of this group, how daunting this task was for them, and how difficult their presentation was going to be. On Friday afternoon, I came to the realization that in true Folger Institute fashion, we were going to do most of the work, and they were going to sit back like a quartet of over-educated Pucks and watch us mere mortals present scenes or parts of scenes from Measure. Dan's minutes concentrate on the various interpretations we gave our scenes. After our scene work Edward dealt specifically with the many kneelings and pardons, both textually explicit and conceptually possible, in the last scene. Again, the group was called upon to suggest various locations for kneelings and pardons in the scene. The session was a profitable experience for us all, or at least for me, and I must grudgingly thank the Measure group for making us do most of the work. Friday Evening We saw the RSC's A Midsummer Night's Dreamat the Kennedy Center. Some of us liked the production a lot, some of us liked it okay, and some of us liked it less. (Personally, I loved the way the production used the lighting to fill the stage. I came to the realization that I had perhaps been seeing too much outdoor festival Shakespeare, which is usually lit with enough sheer bright white candlepower to shag a fly ball under.) Dan's notes on Saturday's discussion of this production are recommended reading. Early Saturday Morning What better way to begin a Saturday morning than a visit from the Queen! Kurt, in grand theatrical fashion, began his presentation with a rather dry description of "Queen for a Day" exercises which teachers can use to acquaint students with the nature of Elizabethan society. He explained how he gets a colleague to portray Queen Elizabeth for his students. Then Julia cranked up the boombox, the curtain parted, and voila, Queen Elizabeth! You just had to be there, I guess. And who am I to judge, anyway? I must have seen ten or twelve productions of Macbeth, and I am still surprised every single damn time when Banquo's ghost materializes at the banquet. But, as the saying goes, when that delightfully real looking and regal Queen Elizabeth appeared, the mule spoke for me. Julia followed Kurt with a beautiful presentation on vocal music which I personally found somewhat disheartening because everything she said seemed so relevant and so important to Shakespeare, and I know virtually nothing about it. Thanks to Julia I now know a great deal more than I did. (The beauty of being ignorant is that everything you learn represents a tremendous leap forward.) I've listened with enjoyment to a lot of renaissance music, and thanks to Julia I will spend some time thinking about it as well. Later Saturday Morning Dan's minutes refer to our discussion of the previous evening's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a "ritual dismemberment," a perfect phrase for most of our discussions, but actually slightly less apt for this one. His notes are excellent, and I defer to them. Early Saturday Afternoon The "Syllabi Group" of Sheila, Paul, and Clare shared Shakespeare courses past, present, and future with us. Sheila's participation in Emory University's British Studies Program will allow her to take a fortunate group of students to England this summer. Sheila stressed her belief that students should discover Shakespeare through first-hand experiences, rather than merely as "received wisdom" (nice phrase, that). Sheila stresses group work in her courses. She also likes to show films or videos in their entirety, rather than in scenes or briefer segments. Paul's interdisciplinary approach to teaching Shakespeare offers many pedagogical possibilities. By encouraging students to look at Shakespeare from a variety of different perspectives, his 6-credit course gives participants the opportunity to look at various social issues as they are treated in Shakespeare's works. A wide range of topics emerges from this approach: Story-telling as a social function, the dynamics of language, music (Is music a Language?), geography (Just where the hell is Illyria, anyway?), religion and its relation to culture, psychology, alcoholism, gender, the acting profession and the role of the theater in society. As I listened to Paul's presentation I was reminded of how these topics invariably surface during a semester-long Shakespeare course. Paul opened up for me the possibility of approaching Shakespeare's works through these issues, instead of treating the issues, as I have usually done, as important sidelights to the plays. Clare's course emphasizes a dramaturgical approach in which the class, working in small groups functioning in roles--performance historian, teacher, director, critic--addresses a variety of issues related to Shakespearean performance. Students thus look at particular aspects of a production--costumes, directing, performance history, lighting, sets, audience education--from different perspectives and in considerable detail. The resulting class project is, in effect, a dramaturg's book, one of the best uses I have seen of classroom publishing. Later Saturday Afternoon The "Language Group" of Eric, Bob, and Tom concluded the February sessions by investigating different aspects relating to Shakespeare's language. Eric opened the final February session with a vigorous warm-up exercise on iambic rhythm in which the group variously crept, walked, and virtually ran through the Folger Theater as Eric called out numbers from one to five representing the various speeds at which we were to move. When we met another group member we made eye contact and squatted at a speed corresponding to the speed at which we were walking. This is all more difficult and more fun than it seems when described. (I suspect Eric enjoyed even more than we did. He certainly found it easier.) >From this opener, Eric moved us into an exercise involving feeling our pulse and walking to the basic iambic rhythm under which we spend our lives. From this, we went to a neat little exercise reminiscent of the children's game of "Gossip," in which a brief saying is sent around a group, undergoing corruption as it progresses. In Eric's exercise the process is reversed. The first participant reads a selection from Shakespeare from which all punctuation has been removed, allowing the following reader to begin the disambiguational process by listening to the rhythm of the passage. This reader then reads the passage to a third person, this time verbally supplying the punctuation until, in the mind and mouth of the third reader, the passage emerges completely disambiguated. Bob presented us with a list of language issues confronting Shakespeare students, using the opening chorus from Henry V to illustrate how he raises these issues with his students. Echoing Caroline's comments from the opening session of the preceding morning, Bob said that he was concerned with convincing students that they have the capacity for overcoming the language difficulties posed by Shakespeare's works. Something Bob said in passing was for me one of the most valuable observations of these sessions: He stressed that in reading Shakespeare he taught students to go up in pitch when they came to a comma, thus preventing the feeling of closure or finality that can deaden a reading. This is such a very simple thing, and yet it is one that I had never heard of, thought of, or been taught about. I tried it out in my survey course the first thing Monday morning as I read something by Wordsworth, something already dead enough without my adding to its numbness by bad comma pitch. I can now personally testify that Bob's tip works. Thanks, Bob! I concluded the presentations by sharing a book that I--and, by coincidence, Cezarija--have come to value greatly as a resource for using film and video. If you need the bibliographical information, the book is Shakespeare on Screen by Kenneth Rothwell and Annabelle Melzer (Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., 23 Leonard Street, New York, NY 10013). The ISBN number is 1-55570-049-7. Dan's minutes have a good account of my presentation, but I would like to call your attention to one thing in my stapled hand-out. Eric Binnie supplied me with a compilation of a hundred or so words that can be particularly confusing to beginning readers of Shakespeare. I made everyone a copy because I found it so useful, and then in the haste of finishing up a long day I forgot to call your attention to it. Saturday Night We saw All's Well That End's Well at the Landsburgh. Here (with genuine apologies to Kelly McGillis) is my Top Ten List of things to say about this production: 10. Now that was a production of All's Well. 9. Kelly McGillis was something, wasn't she? 8. Everyone in the audience secretly loved it when they blindfolded Parolles and bound him helpless and spreadeagled between the poles. I could practically smell the leather from where I sat. Oh, for whips and chains! 7. How much did you say those tickets were? 6. Kelly McGillis was something, wasn't she? 5. Gee, I wonder why I've never taught this play? 4. I could practically smell the leather from where I sat. 3. How old is Kelly McGillis, anyway? 2. Who were those masqued men? 1. What could Shakespeare have been thinking? And then, it was back to our several worlds. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes, Reflections and Commentary 21-23 March 1996 by Cezarija Abartis and Bill Taylor Your notetakers for March, who compiled and edited these minutes, Cezarija Abartis and Bill Taylor, changed the procedure slightly and integrated commentary within the minutes. In effect, we have abandoned objectivity. We have two (2, II, deux) good reasons. 1) We cannot be objective. b) Kurt proposed the two types of minutes; he is now a doctor; argal, we don't have to listen to him. Thursday evening, March 21 Guests: the ACTER company--Gareth Armstrong, Sarah Berger, Sam Dale, Joanna Foster, Phillip Joseph We convened at 7:30 in the Folger Theatre. We missed Sheila, who would not be able to join us until the next morning. There are three essays by Michael Warren to read for April. Five of the sixteen of us have already seen the ACTER Macbeth. In our reviews of the play, be kind we were begged, since the actors had seven more performances. Or perhaps after our comments, the actors would change their performance completely, Audrey said reassuringly. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Tom for his masterpiece in three fits. We applauded him and then we applauded Dr. Daw, who learned yesterday that he was official. (Tom shook his head. "And we thought he was one of us all along.") Joanna Foster, Sarah Berger, Phillip Joseph, Gareth Armstrong, and Sam Dale were with us and we went around the circle on-stage twice, each saying our first names sweetly and clearly. The five guests would let us observe the process of rehearsal (and we would the next day present our rehearsal for their scrutiny) of a scene about rehearsal. The scene they would rehearse before us was 1.2 of MND so that we could see what questions they ask of each other and of the roles. Casting decisions were first; they made US cast it: Bill noticed that Phillip, who was terrified of doing Bottom, dropped out of the discussion and began sneaking a look at the scene, moving his lips as he read Bottom's lines; Gareth was Peter Quince, Sam was Flute, Joanna was Snout, Sarah was Starveling, and Audrey was Snug. Actors (like Institutinarians) would like to postpone the work indefinitely by taking a break for coffee and cigarettes, although smoking is not always allowed in rehearsal rooms. Phillip sadly observed, "It's a draconian world." The question of doubling in roles came up. Gareth thought post-rationalization and serendipity were operative principles, but there was one more: the Risibility Factor. Romeo and Juliet can't move after they die. At 8:13, after the delaying strategies ran out, the reading of 1.2 started; at 8:18, their rich, mellifluous reading ended. They asked: Where are we? Who are we? Should we rough-stage it or go to the next scene? Sarah said if they found the truth of who those characters are, the humor would come from that. What about funny voices--and do they all come from the same village? They're artisans committed to the solution of aesthetic problems. Sam said, "They really do their best with all the wit and sincerity they can muster." Sarah's comment came in response to a discussion of what approach they should take to the humor. Some of the actors, whose characters had few lines in 1.2, did not have a good feeling for the "throughline" of their characters, and that was the main reason they went ahead to 3.1. They read the rehearsal scene about the problems of acting and art (3.1) for the throughline of character (8:24 - 8:27). Quince starts the first scene (has a calendar, has written the play, is more meticulous) and Bottom, already moving into the driver's seat, starts the second scene. What about their names? Quince is fruit, makes a bland jam. Snug is appropriate for the joiner and perhaps has associations with sleepiness. Bottom is a weaver, a fool, and later an ass. During the discussion of names, it was Alan who mentioned that Quince is a carpenter. Nobody picked up on that, but in his case, his occupation as a "maker" is probably more important than his name. The mechanicals have come after work probably, to rehearse for a competition that might select them to perform at a wedding. They're rehearsing secretly, so no one steals their ideas. They stood up to do a reading of 1.2 on their feet. They tried Irish dialect for everyone, but only very briefly. Bottom moved to look over Quince's shoulder; Starveling moved to her mentor, Bottom; Starveling asked Bottom to scare her with his horrible lines. Snug softly told Quince she is slow of study and repeated the line "That would hang us, every mother's son," half a step behind everyone. What about the joke on the French crowns? Are they embarrassed, or do they laugh, or do they not get it? There's no way to convey that joke to a modern audience and it's dangerous for an actor to laugh at a joke on-stage when an audience doesn't. Joanna thought that Quince may be the only one to get the joke, and each character deals with that. There was much discussion of the archaism in the last line "Hold, or cut bowstrings." Keep mum; keep your word or you'll be caught with your pants down. Paul read the note in the Arden edition: "The precise meaning is unclear." Sarah said that for those actors other than Bottom and Quince, the actor has to have a clear sense of who the characters are. Starveling seems young and gullible or he's dragged in to play Thisby's mother, perhaps a gangly, awkward teenager--but this encroaches on Snug's territory and on Flute's territory. Flute plays the pretty Thisby; he's an adolescent with a breaking voice and a bum-fluff beard. Sam read the line with a promise at the end: "I've got a beard--coming." Joanna thought Snout was a bully boy, so Audrey thought Snug should be near Snout. Should Flute arrive late? or Snug? Much of the above discussion arose in relation to the question of whether Flute has done a good job or a terrible job of casting. Is Flute good casting as Thisby, or dreadful casting? Then similar questions arose regarding all the others. Regarding the paragraph following: Bill had just finished writing a note to himself that most of the things they were discussing at this point would have been, in most productions, already decided by the director before the first rehearsal, and then imposed upon the actors. No sooner had Bill written that, when they raised the question and dealt with it very directly, and that is what led to the discussion of various kinds of directors. Ed enjoyed and found interesting the way the actors negotiated for the spotlight (by discussing which character should arrive late) in a subtle, non-aggressive way. Sarah said, everyone needs to know who they are. Gareth said, we all want the other four to be wonderful because we're responsible. They hand the directorial baton to each other, give each other ideas; they know when to leave each other alone; they want to get the best out of each other; they are working with peers they respect and so they listen to each other. Gareth said a director can be an ogre, a guru, a prat, and that designers can be as tyrannical as directors. Audrey said that British directors are more tyrannical than American directors. Phillip said that directors should themselves have acted. Joanna said a director should realize a note may not be appropriate at a certain time but may be fine for the actor to hear later. Sarah said a good director listens to an actor and brings out more than they thought possible. Caroline, delighted, said this sounded like faculty talking about administrators. Sam recalled an experience with a good director who asked him to write out longhand the incontrovertible facts about the character as well as what others said about him four times in the course of rehearsal. He found out more and more each time. Eric asked how the five got picked. A board of associate directors in Britain chooses the principal actor; one associate director and the actor choose the second actor; they choose the third, and so on. They rehearse for 6 weeks and perform for 8 weeks on the road, so they must be compatible, flexible, versatile, energetic. When they think about bringing actors into this troupe, they consider seriously their ability to cope with classes. Gareth, generally speaking, prefers to teach by himself; Sam said he likes a few shared classes, likes to rock 'n' roll with his colleagues; Gareth still prefers to teach alone. Phillip asked, "If you had to teach this scene, how would you show students this is funny?" Sam started with Shakespeare's warmth and love for these characters. Ellen said this was the comic analogue for all the scenes in this play about love; they're all fools but the lovers don't know they're playing a part. Caroline said that Snug would be the student who would ask if that would be on the test, and Bottom would be the student who waved his hand begging to be called on, saying, "I know, I know." Alan said that when Starveling said to Bottom "play it to me and scare me" that Bottom took off. The character playing Moonshine, most timid, is the one who puts down the courtiers. Audrey said this is topsy-turvydom--these mechanicals put on a classical play. Alan brought up the punctuation of 1.2.96 in the quarto (the authoritative version of this play): "We will meet, and there we may rehearse most obscenely, and courageously." The comma after "obscenely" is deleted in modern editions. Sarah thought the comma makes space for a laugh. "I will roar, that I will do any man's heart good to hear me" (1.2.64). Sarah suggested that the comma makes space for a roar. At 9:47, Audrey and Alan said we must adjourn because some of the actors had to drive a distance. We were grateful, grateful, grateful for this added session. As Bill recalls, just before Alan and Audrey's suggestion, Phillip had suddenly sensed that the group's energy was flagging. He said, "Are you getting bored?" which was certainly not the case. Bill, for one, however, was getting very tired, and Phillip, the consummate reader of audiences, realized it before Bill did. Friday, March 22, 1996 We had our morning coffee and pastries and mingled with our guests. With trepidation, we broke up to rehearse our prepared scenes before our guests. These were the assignments: Sam--Julius Caesar; Phillip--Measure for Measure; Joanna--Taming of the Shrew; Sarah--Twelfth Night; Gareth--Pericles. Of course, the trepidation was unnecessary. Gareth coached Eric and Cezarija in 5.1 of Pericles and they found him wonderful; Gareth had to leave for the dentist because he broke a tooth and did not want to drool during the Friday night performance, so Audrey came in to coach Eric and Cezarija and she was most wonderful; Gareth returned and he was yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping. We trust you all had whooping experiences. Sarah worked with two different couples doing scenes from Twelfth Night: Tom and Bill as Toby and Andrew in 1.3, and Miranda and Sheila as Viola and Orsino in 2.4. She was remarkably helpful to each pair, though in rather different ways. With Tom and Bill, she worked, not on physical business, as Bill, at least, had expected, but on analysis of character, character relationships, and situation. Looking at these two men very seriously resulted in their becoming much funnier, and yet much more affecting--especially Andrew. With Sheila and Miranda, Sarah placed greatest emphasis upon the verse, and letting the verse and the imagery direct the action and the relationship. This was extremely effective. Throughout the rehearsal of both scenes, Sarah was able to make all four Folgerites feel extraordinarily at ease and free to experiment. As a result, Bill was able to be sillier than he would otherwise have dared as Andrew, and Miranda felt free to deliver an extremely moving and effective rendition of "Patience on a monument." We convened about 11:40 in the theatre and Alan passed out a three-page handout, "Draft Entries from A Dictionary of English Renaissance Stage Vocabulary," with its many citations of "as at," "as to," "as from," "as in," etc. Alan confessed that in 1991 he realized that vocabulary, language (like Eric, Bob, and Tom in their project) is what he's been exploring in his scholarship over the years, that this major insight was a long time a-borning. What was the shared vocabulary between the stage and the audience, and how much of that is accessible to us at a remove of 400 years? Alan passed out a tiny (2 1/2" x 4 1/2") handout that raised big issues. Sidney's "The Defense of Poesy" (1595) shows him to be a shrewd observer in his witty skewering of the rationale that lies behind a typical romance of the 1570s, which he interprets accurately, if scornfully. The costumes, props, and dialogue make it possible to recognize the locale without a physical set. A positive interpretation of the necessity for such scene establishment is presented in the Prologue of Henry V, in which the Chorus exhorts and pleads with the playgoer to use imagination. Alan studied 20,000 stage directions, teased out of 600 plays. When an actor walks on-stage, where is the actor coming from and what is the actor entering to, and how does the audience construe that space of the chameleon stage, which does not have a set? How does the significance of the locale relate to the transaction of the scene? These questions were inspired, in part, by Alan's noticing the three stage directions for vanishing in The Tempest. In the surviving plays, 90% of the stage directions come from the authors, but they are not necessarily what the actors did. Playwrights, particularly professional playwrights, would not, however, write stage directions that actors could not play. Antonio and Gonzalo look at the same space differently; Tamara describes the woods as beautiful; Gloucester thinks of the place as steep. A costume (an overcoat) and a prop (a torch) might signal the outdoors. Paul explained that in Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt could be signified by Egyptian dress and the actor's carrying two, sometimes three, cats under each arm. Audrey said that the use of objects makes the play longer, less free-flowing. Clare said that the stage directions are, first of all, directions for actors, and secondarily for the audience. Audrey said the scene direction gives a description to the people who make the choices, the actors. Paul said that in many scenes, the setting is not crucial. Sarah said that when it is crucial, it's reiterated throughout the scene. Alan said the stage is neutral until the entering actors define the space. On a bare stage, the introduction of an image in rich language is especially noticeable. Lady Macbeth's carrying a light does not work as powerfully on a modern lighted stage. There are no distinctions between the numbers of props used in tragedies and comedies. In the stage directions we are allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation between the performers, writer, and audience, but we can hear only tantalizing fragments. In some cases we know we don't know; but in what cases are we wrong about what we think we know? Sarah said the stage has come full circle; it cannot compete with movies in realism, and so can be minimalist. Audrey said both Greek and Renaissance theater were in the open air and undelineated space, and maybe theater deteriorated when it moved indoors. We convened at 2:00 and Phillip kindly was volunteered to deal with scansion. But to begin, we went around the circle on-stage saying our first names; the second time we were to do it more loudly. And then the game began. Phillip clasped his hands and pointed at Sam and said, "Sam, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten." Before Phillip got to "ten," Sam had to point and aim and name somebody else. No "er" was allowed. Then the pace was made more challenging--shortened to five. People rose and stood behind their chairs as they were out. The game stopped when four were left sitting. (Alan seemed to be on the way to winning; he was far and away the best at it.) Phillip apologized for the "silly game," but we all loved being boisterous. It's a way of bringing up the energy and volume of a class. Phillip passed out copies of Sonnet 2, "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow." We went around the circle, each person reading one line, loud, so the person across the room could hear it, and not dropping the voice at the end of the line. Then we read two lines at a time, and then to the period. We were not discussing the sonnet but rather hearing the lines. We were to take a big breath and not pause at the end commas. Then we were allowed to make our choices and pause at commas if we wished. We read line by line, overscanning it, making the iambic beat vulgarly regular. From overscanning, we heard that "livery" (3) was three syllables. Then we read it for sense and fluidity. Is "warm" (14) a verb or an adjective? An ambiguity? Going around the circle we read Sonnet 1, "From fairest creatures we desire increase," one line at a time, keeping the energy up at the end of the line. We took turns reading to the period. We read a line at a time overscanning it. Phillip said that with great jazz singing, the rhythm is absorbed but doesn't disappear. They spent quite a bit of time discussing various dialects, British RP, American, Welsh, etc., which gave weight to their advice to use the accent that is natural to you. Sam and Phillip talked about the muscularity, wit, and color that reside in your accent. Relish the language. We each had to tell our birthdays to the iambic beat: "November fourth, the day that I was born." "On August tenth my birthday falls each year." "My birthday's on the twenty-sixth of June." For the second meter exercise we counted off in pairs and were to compose two lines of iambic pentameter in which one person described that morning's breakfast and the second person completed the conversation. I was so enchanted with the poetry around me, I copied only two fragments: "I had a cup of coffee and a roll . . ." "My jacket simply will not keep me warm." We had a coffee break and convened at 3:10. Still working with Sonnets 1 and 2, Audrey had us en masse choose a line and when we came to the end of the line, we were to throw it with the arm. For a variation, we were to kick at the end of the line, then punch with a fist or hit with an elbow; then we were to jump at the end of the line. All these exercises put emphasis on the end of the line--and upon feeling the language physically. For recognizing iambic rhythm, Audrey has students beat ta-tum with the fingers or slap the thigh. Audrey wrote on the board lines from plays that do not scan as regularly as lines from sonnets: Fool, of I thyself I speak well. / Fool, do / not flatter. That sucked / the hon/ ey of/ his mu/ sic vows. Let's be sac/ rific/ ers, but / not butch/ ers, Caius. In this exercise she learned from George Amis, we were to assign stress to each syllable, where 1 is the strongest and 4 is the weakest. There is some variation on the assigning of stress, but it does help the actors find the stressed words and they see there are only one or two words to emphasize in each line. Tom uses an analogy with marching bands and concert bands when teaching rhythm. He tells his students, "You can feel the drum, but you shouldn't hear it all the time." Paul has students tap the foot then move on to syncopation. Julia has students hum (rather than recite) the lines, individually or as a group. Eric tells students that, generally speaking, the 4th and 10th beat receive the greatest emphasis. Bill has students write limericks of their own, but some can't hear the beat; Audrey suggested tapping the rhythm on the back. Alan told us that we had two choices of subject matter for our papers on the Macbeth performance that evening: 1) What are the advantages or disadvantages of a minimalist Macbeth? 2) What is a distinctive choice in the production? Audrey played a hard-won cassette of Cicely Berry speaking her exercises for relaxation that Audrey acquired in St. Paul's from an eccentric publishing house in an alley and up a winding staircase. What Cezarija most remembers is "Slowly, do not hurry." Audrey had Ellen, Julia, and Eric read 1.1 of Macbeth. She tells her students, "You are detectives, listening to the evidence. What are the facts of this?" From the audience we noted foul weather; intent to reunite; an upcoming battle; Paddock (still a Scots term for "toad") calls; it's day. Maybe reread the scene after all the facts have been noted. Students can add sounds: stamping on floor for thunder, finger-tapping for rain, tearing a sheet for lightning, cat meowing, frog paddock-mg. Edward has a variation on this exercise in which students put up their hands every time someone recognizes a fact. For the second exercise, group members read 1.2, and the other members were researchers, each with one book (a concordance to Macbeth, Partridge's Shakespeare's Bawdy, C. T. Onions' A Shakespeare Glossary; the Old Variorum, the Folio version, and a number of modern editions); Ellen was to watch out for figures of speech. The researchers would shout "stop" when there was a note on the word or line spoken. And there should be a scribe to write down all the words and references that need researching. Audrey's third exercise required us to work out for 2.3 the entrances and exits on an Elizabethan stage. We split into two groups and decided to make use of the trapdoor and side doors and central door. This was problem-solving in action. Saturday, March 23 There were pastries and coffee in the morning. Cezarija is getting spoiled. She is coming to expect such treats when she enters her own English Department. Alas, there are only memos. One announcement: Ellen Summers has been made chair of her department. Applause was clapped and condolences were moaned. Sam worked with Macbeth's soliloquy "If it were done when tis done" (1.7.l-28). We talked about the purpose of a soliloquy. A soliloquy is an inner truth addressed to an audience; it's "active," a debate with an audience, not an address to a missing fourth wall; an actor may even address lines to specific members of the audience to avoid a generalized address; the audience is engaged internally even though silent; actors can tell from the quality of the silence how engaged the audience is. This soliloquy, one of the best, is a tremendous journey; Macbeth talks himself out of the murder in the course of the soliloquy; but Lady Macbeth enters and there's a re-persuasion. This soliloquy has an immediate start, with a straightforward declaration. Sam asked what sort of state is Macbeth in at the end? Paul said it's not a decision but a desire to do it. Dan said he's moved from a visceral to a moral level. Sam said that this recapitulates Lady Macbeth's earlier analysis of his character--that he doesn't have the requisite ruthlessness. Has Macbeth concluded his speech or does she interrupt him? Alan said the Folio has a period. She completes the line. Sam prefers that it's an interruption. Ellen agreed: these two have so few conversations together, and when they do meet, he breaks in on her, and she breaks in on him. We counted off in pairs for performing the soliloquy. "A" reads the speech to "B," who listens. Every time "A" reaches a period, "B" says, "Do it," perhaps with varying intonation. "A" must be affected, provoked, challenged. Then the roles are reversed. After the exercise, Edward noted that the insistence is powerful; the sentences keep getting longer; the vehemence is a sign of his energy to do it. Bill noted the escalation of imagery as the speech proceeds. Clare said it's as if Macbeth is speaking to Lady Macbeth on his shoulder, and then she actually enters. Phillip, who was "reticent about introducing silly games," taught us Zip, Zap, Pow, which won us over completely. Once again, put your hands together, as if in prayer and point at the person beside you (for example, on your left) and say "Zip." That person can point left, saying "Zip," or reverse direction, saying "Zap," or point across the circle, saying "Pow." If you hesitate or do not suit the word to the action and direction, you are out of the game. It's a concentration exercise that raises the energy level of the group and makes much hilarity. We read Macbeth's soliloquy 2.1.42-73 ("Is this a dagger which I see before me"), one line each around the circle. Because students' voices fall at the end, we were to stress the end. Phillip heard a kind of "panicky drive" as he listened to us. Then we each read two lines around the circle. Phillip told us two more variations. Just say the first word of the line and think the rest of the line. Or say the last word of each line of a sonnet, where much of the meaning and emphasis resides. We read one sentence at a time. Phillip said, "Try to hold on to the energy of the end of the line but read to the period. Keep the stage hot. Take out the commas and read to the end of the sentence." Each of us whispered one sentence at a time. People across the room should be able to hear us. "Just pass on information. Stop acting. You don't have an accent when you whisper." This requires good articulation. Then Bill whispered the whole speech to us as we listened and did not read the speech. We paired off and one person read the soliloquy while the other provided an elusive dagger which the speaker attempted to follow. Then roles were reversed. This was a simple way of getting at some of the meaning of the soliloquy. It taught focus and concentration. In the last reading of the soliloquy, each person read a sentence, this time angrily. This gave us permission to open our mouths and shout. Joanna worked with 1.5.30-58 "The raven himself is hoarse." One-half the class, ten of us, read Lady Macbeth's lines going round the semicircle, one line apiece. A messenger (played by Ed) comes in from a great distance, and all the Lady Macbeths face him. What has just happened? What is her state? First she received the letter from Macbeth; then she speaks a soliloquy in which she analyzes her husband; and then the third element--the messenger from outside. The rest of the class--about eleven--formed a semicircle facing the Lady Macbeths and were spirits, whose job was to whisper every time she invoked them and said, "Come, you spirits." It was an extratextual and extraterrestrial sound. The spirits are there; it's a matter of awaking them; the invisible and inaudible give weight to the word. Each Lady Macbeth read two lines and paraphrased the meaning, explaining the images; i.e., we did an explication of the soliloquy. "The raven himself is hoarse": a symbolic bird or the messenger or a real bird that evokes the concrete world they live in? The messenger races ahead of Macbeth who races ahead of Duncan. Lena said that this is about urgency, about the raven croaking so much. Joanna said it could be that the raven is so frightened it's unable to speak--it's that dark, that fatal. "Unsex me here": make me like a man or make me neuter; take away my womanhood or genitals and ability to make life, for now I will kill. She asks to be emptied and then filled up again from the crown to toe. "Make thick my blood": thin blood is weak, runs freely, is wholesome; thick blood is strong; she wants to act without feelings, the deadening of the vehicle. "Stop up the access and passage to remorse": where do we feel remorse? we think of it as in the heart. "And take my milk for gall": gall is bile; bitterness and energy is driving the speech; she needs image after image to keep going; gall is the antithesis to breast milk. "That my keen knife see not the wound it makes": the knife is the means of the murder, but even it should be blindfolded as she has blindfolded herself and does not want to see the murder. Phillip, Sam, and Joanna (and later, Sarah) all began by breaking the speech or sonnet into fragments: words, phrases, lines, sentences, and speaking them in a variety of ways, but Joanna soon moved from that into an extremely detailed analysis of the very dense imagery of the speech. The other three, on balance, were more concerned with the sound--or with getting their students to hear the sound--she with the evocative imagery. Gareth would lead us through 5.1; he chooses to do scenes he's not acting in because he may get too many wonderful ideas. The scene is preceded by a rhyming couplet and followed by a scene in blank verse. This scene is about 80 lines, with the first 70 in prose and the last 10 in blank verse. A man and a woman enter; they are two new characters, not named, who are types. Miranda played the Doctor and Bill the Gentlewoman. There is a balance of authority: she has information he needs. She doesn't tell him when and what Lady Macbeth has said because she has no witness; the doctor has watched two nights and has seen nothing; her reticence gives a sense of the paranoia in the kingdom. Lady Macbeth unlocks (rather than "opens") her closet and writes on the paper. What is on this paper? Ellen wondered if it's a letter to her husband, but he'll never read it because it's sealed. Gareth said they've stopped talking to each other since the banquet. Clare wondered if it's a confession or crazy scribbling; or a warning to Lady Macduff; or a letter to posterity or to her child; a suicide note; or nothing. Then Gareth asked us to close our eyes and listen to the dialogue; we would be focused as if on a radio play in which every detail is noticed. New questions: Why is the Gentlewoman up? was she assigned to watch Lady Macbeth? by Macbeth? Do they have separate bedrooms? or is this a recent situation since Macbeth has left for the field? At lines 31 ff., Lady Macbeth's speech is a sum of previous lines. We could ask the class how her lines echo lines from earlier scenes; which ones? The Doctor says, "Go to, go to! You have known what you should not" (42); is this addressed to himself or to the Gentlewoman or to Lady Macbeth? Gareth asked Bill and Miranda to read those few lines reflecting those three options, as if this reveals the paranoia of these two, who don't trust each other. There are three repetitions of "well," five of "to bed," four of "come" in Her speech, which make it urgent, bathetic, sexual. To whom does the Doctor address his last lines? to himself? the Gentlewoman? the audience? And then we had a coffee break. About 11:45, we began our discussion of the minimalist ACTER Macbeth we saw the night before. DIRECTOR AND CONCEPT Alan asked Ed to summarize his analysis. Ed believes this is a philosophical question, since the troupe has no director, but for him the director is at the apex of the triangle--which is not to minimize the text and actors, for they flow into the top of the triangle. Julia said that the director can assist making the choices out of all the possibilities. Alan said even ACTER sometimes wants a director or umpire. Sam said, Shakespeare does direct himself; trust the text; what he has learned from these tours is that it's all there; the play's the thing. Ed asked, if there is no director, is there a take on the material? Sam said, there will be a style because the composition of the troupe of five varies from year to year. Sarah said one example of this was their deciding to use stylized fights. Phillip said, it annoys me, concept theater because brilliant productions develop step by step. Gareth said that concept theater cuts the lines that don't fit the concept. Dan said there are a variety of concepts within the text, rather than a univocal concept. Ed said that the job of a director is to articulate the concept right out front, in a Brechtian way, and to provide an environment that is creative. Sheila asked why is the director to be trusted over the text. Kurt said, what if it were five unintelligent actors, or what if it were twenty actors without a director? Joanna preferred to the analogy of the triangle the analogy of a circle with a director at the center attached by strings to each actor, one in which finally the director disappears from the play. Julia said that a decision to do a particular play to a particular audience is already a concept, since plays go in and out of fashion, depending on the social context; it's false to oppose text and concept. DOUBLING Cezarija said that the actors' doubling in roles would confuse viewers unfamiliar with the play. Sam said that in his experience, unsophisticated audiences who hadn't read the play liked the minimalist production. Phillip said, "You don't need a brain to listen to Shakespeare; you need a heart." Gareth said, concentration, not intelligence, was required. Miranda said students need preparation so they would be in a position to enjoy the production, and that was the job of the instructor. Sarah said they want students to see their productions as relevant, vital, vibrant; this is as theatrical as it gets; but their job is made difficult if there's no preparation and no follow-up; we must teach the next generation or live theater will die. PROPS, COSTUMES, AND STYLIZED FIGHTS Alan said there have been 25 productions since the fall of 1983, and that he has seen 22; others have used more props. Sam said the men's costumes did not indicate a particular time, just war, and the salutes and bows also were not localized. The women's costumes were inspired by Vietnamese dress, with the front panels giving the effect of tabards for the male roles. The green oblong scarf starts as a costume but works as a prop when it's stretched before Hecate's face. Bob asked if they missed the props. Phillip said it's a practical decision because it's hard to travel with a lot of props. Sarah said, it starts with something like Lady Macbeth's letter--where do you put this if there are no pockets? Sarah said that she doesn't miss the props because she believes in their existence so intensely that she found she was setting the imaginary daggers down on a chair after her exit. The absence of props and of realistic fights makes the play move faster. Joanna said the final stage fight should be the climax, but it frequently seems an anticlimax after 30 people and lots of props. Alan said the company plays the uncut text. Only the names "Malcolm" and "Macduff" were introduced for clarity. Audrey liked the Malcolm scene played seriously, so that the audience is not tipped off that Malcolm is testing Macduff; it's patronizing to Macduff to let the audience know but not Macduff; Malcolm is an intelligent and ruthless young man, trained by Duncan that "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face." Sam likes to have the actors sit on-stage when they're not playing a part; Sarah doesn't want to watch Macbeth's actions because Lady Macbeth does not see him after the banquet scene. Whew. Lunch. We convened about 2:20. Sarah said she often works with a class of 65 six-to-ten-year olds or thirteen- and fourteen-year olds. She has everybody do and say something immediately. 1) Stand up. Everybody jump up and down. 2) Say "ha," as you jump. 3) Say it loudly as you jump. We worked on the ghost's speech from Hamlet, 1.5.64-84. We each read one word around the circle of the speech that begins "Sleeping within my orchard." Every word has a value. The last word of the line is as important as the first. Then we each read a phrase to the comma, which gives some sense of the meaning. The clause that encloses "quicksilver" is long, imitating its coursing through the body, where the length imitates the sense. To make distinctions among items in a series, Sarah had three Folgerites say "orange," "apple," "banana," and then she told them that apple was better than orange and banana better than apple. She wanted to hear that gradation in the speaking of the word. They repeated the words so we could hear the distinctions. Then three people said one word each of "Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled" and "of life, of crown, of queen." The entire chorus said, "0 horrible! 0 horrible! Most horrible!" Then we each read a phrase to the comma, starting with a whisper at one end of the circle, getting louder as we went around the circle, finally shouting at the other end of the circle. This is to gain a level of dramatic build. In our semicircle we were the choral ghost, with one person cast as a central ghost speaking the first line and two lines from the middle. Sarah asked where the ghost should come from. Above? Below? We decided it rose from below. Audrey was cast as Hamlet kneeling in the middle of the semicircle. What is the time? Night, before dawn. What kind of sounds are there? the sea, the wind whistling; to make it urgent Sarah suggested a heartbeat and pulse sound--da-dum. Two or three people made each of these sounds, while the rest of us individually or in chorus read the Ghost's speech. The chorus was to build in intensity, to try to terrify Audrey. We did it once. Sarah said if we didn't terrify Audrey, she would turn away. We were to relish words like "cursed hebona" and "loathsome vile." This exercise can also be done with the Chorus speech from Henry V. Then we broke up to rehearse our prepared scenes before our actors. Eric and Cezarija performed Pericles 5.1 before Sam, who was most wonderful. In the morning discussion of the performance, Sam had said that he sometimes picks one person from the audience to address his soliloquy or speech to, that it makes you act better. In rehearsal he suggested Cezarija address an aside to him. She had been saying it to a general audience, but speaking the words to him made them more real. Alan said we'd had rehearsal experience with some of the best teachers we could possibly have. Yes! The two Twelfth Night pairs worked with Gareth. He spent a good deal of time with Bill and Tom building the physical comedy of the scene, in support of the character relationships they had worked on with Sarah. With Sheila and Miranda, he worked on developing nuance in interpretation. We convened in the theater at 4:30. For April we will have three sessions with Michael Warren, who is Audrey's colleague at Santa Cruz (one on King Lear and variant texts; one on some other play/s with multiple texts; one on dramaturgy linking academe and theater). We are to bring copies of Titus (perhaps LLL now), Lear, and As You Like It. Audrey will speak on the role of the director, using Lear or As You Like It. We will have our Saturday morning play reaction. Saturday night we will do a play reading. Audrey will show 20 minutes of John Barton's "Playing Shakespeare" series. We are to think of resources not yet explored to share with each other. We decided in our evaluation of the Institute not to split into theater and literature teachers but to meet as a whole. Eric asked, "What do Shakespeare teachers want in English?" Bob said, "A way into expanding their approach toward including performance." Alan said that in English departments, teachers are not teaching the text, but theory or the text in its relation to culture. For May and The Project, suggestions were a website for the future, but it's a lot of work; videotaping a session but the value seems doubtful. There was no disagreement, however, about a banquet Saturday night with entertainment, music, and a performance of "The Couch of Casting: A Drama in Three Fits." Julia suggested a "recipe book" of pedagogical exercises as a record and an aid culled from the minutes. This could be formatted along the lines of Viola Spolin's Theater Games for Rehearsal: A Director's Handbook (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1985) or Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1963). The chapters might include Warm-up, Breathing, Voice, Scansion, Use of Video, Text Work, Alternate Interpretations, Scene Work. Ed offered the titles of other resources: Patsy Rodenburg's The Right to Speak (NY: Routledge, 1992); for scansion he mentioned again Cicely Berry's Voice and The Actor (NY: Macmillan, 1974), Berry's Your Voice and How to Use It Successfully (London: Harrup, 1975), and Kristin Linklater's Freeing the Natural Voice (NY: Drama Book Specialists, 1976). The Measure for Measure team suggested work linked to one play to give unity to the project. But our gang was too ornery. HERE WE GET MURKY & MAYBE INACCURATE. For May, we are to bring 25 paper copies of exercises to distribute to everyone. For April we are to bring a disk and a paper copy for Tom, who gallantly, generously, and fittingly volunteered to assemble The Project. Anyone reading these minutes to find out what we are supposed to do for April and May is in trouble advised to see the directives from Alan, Julia, and Tom which have since come forth. For May we are to bring a couple or three lines from Shakespeare that describe our character. What doth Tom have in mind? Saturday evening, after a buffet of salads and desserts (and champagne to celebrate Kurt's elevated status), Joanna read the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Grace Nichols, and Gareth presented scenes and commentary on early and later villains, Richard III and Macbeth. Your minute-takers had too much fun to take minutes. Finally, dear friends, piece this out with memory and imagination. If we have attributed egregious statements to you, let us know and forgive us. If we have omitted your comments, please repeat them in April. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes 26-27 April 1996 by Cezarija Abartis Friday, April 26 Visiting Contributor: Michael Warren, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz. We convened in the Board Room rather than the Theatre because the stage was full of props and scenery for the evening performance of As You Like it. Audrey introduced her greatly-esteemed colleague, Michael Warren, who had recently won the major teaching award on campus, the Alumni Award, and who has been and continues to be textual consultant for the Shakespeare Festival at Santa Cruz. Michael began by saying that, as Textual Consultant, he takes no blame for anything that happens and that so much of what he does has been influenced by Alan and Audrey. He used Alan's handout because he was pressed for a first class in January. He remarked that joining our convivial and well-bonded group was like coming to a party at midnight when everybody's drunk and the new partygoer was stone-cold sober. Soon he would be giddy with the rest of us. Michael uses variant texts in teaching Shakespeare because discussion of variants allows him to have ideas in class. The problem of finding things to say about things is diminished with comparative texts; he shows students variants of Thomas Wyatt's "They flee from me that sometime did me seek," and freedom comes from the act of contrasts as students feel it's possible to respond to different versions. They see the text as a product of editorial process, constantly changing--even now. Michael had asked us to read three articles: E. A. J. Honigmann's "Shakespeare's Revised Plays: King Lear and Othello," which examines the strategy of revision within the totality of meaning in the play; Gary Taylor's "Revising Shakespeare," which is funny and shows "a wonderful disrespect that was necessary at the time"; Janette Dillon's "Is There a Performance in this Text?" which shows the fetishization going on about early texts, especially about performance having a kind of definitiveness about it. Like Ernest Honigmann, Michael strongly claims that the pattern of differences between the variants shows they are distinct drafts which should not be conflated into one ideal text. He is interested in different interpretations, stages, and versions. The elements that resist such tolerance for variant texts are 1) the impulse toward something that is containable; people want to buy one finished text; 2) the (decayed? descended? evolved?) Marxist argument that so many hands went into the formation of the text that the author ceases to exist. Michael said that someone's extra words always enter into writing and confessed that John M. Ellis provided 106 words that Michael incorporated into his "Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar." We counted off by four to rehearse, for about 20 minutes, one of four scenes from the Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear in order to perform the Folio version first because it is the more familiar. -2.4.176-200 Goneril and Regan take center stage. In the Quarto, Goneril enters for the dominance game and attacks Regan: "Who struck my servant"; in the Folio the line is spoken by Lear with one verb change: "Who stockt my servant?" -3.6.97-114 Kent's and Edgar's last speeches are cut from the Folio version. Both Lear and the Fool leave the stage, the Fool for the last time. In the Quarto the Fool can help off Lear; in the Folio, Edgar can help; or Kent and Gloucester can help off Lear. Alan said the Folio is tight, the Quarto expansive; the pacing is different. Michael said the Folio emphasizes continuing haste, while the Quarto allows a meditative moment for Edgar. Audrey said that the pain of Lear's being taken off is mitigated by Edgar's speech in the Quarto. Bill said if (in the Folio) Gloucester is herding them offstage, there is no choice for the others. -3.7.94-108 One of the key questions is when do the servants take Gloucester offstage. In the Quarto, perhaps Gloucester is removed with "Lets follow the old Earle." In Peter Brook's Lear, for a chilling moment, the interval lights came on and Gloucester groped his way offstage. The servants do not speak the last four speeches in the Folio. The opening of 4.1 in the next scene has an added 3 1/2 lines. Julia suggested that those added lines foreshadow the imagery of the Dover scene. -5.3.300-28 In the Quarto, Lear speaks "Breake hart"; in the Folio, Kent speaks that line. Clare said that in the Quarto Lear has to faint and then un-faint to speak a line. Michael said that the fainting can be collapsing. Michael said he's a great defender of the Quarto, which takes out the sentimental interpretation; Kenneth Muir's Arden edition cites A.C. Bradley "that Kent may be speaking of his own heart." If Lear speaks the line, it may be an unsentimental willed suicide; Lear has had enough. Ellen said that in the Quarto Lear shows a willingness, an eagerness to die; in the Folio Lear prolongs his own life for his daughter's sake. Michael said perhaps the Folio's "looke on her" is Lear's anger or Lear's acknowledgment of Cordelia's death; the range of possible interpretations is immense, and we all make meaning--that's our job. Michael likes the silent Edgar of the Quarto, which gives the final speech to Albany, for Edgar has gone through so much. After break, Audrey led a session on pedagogical resources. We counted off in pairs to read through Love's Labour's Lost 3.1.131-74, one person reading the part of a pompous Armado and an eager Berowne, and the second person reading the part of Costard, and then we switched parts. Audrey shows John Barton's "Playing Shakespeare" in her Voice class, which meets for two 2 and 1/2-hour and two 2-hour sessions a week. She shows half of a tape in each of the 2 and 1/2-hour sessions, finishing the whole eleven-part series in the course of ten weeks. Whatever the limitations of the series might be, there are also wonderful scenes from the actors and great good sense. Hearing the rhythm (not the accent) of the language seeps into students during the course of the quarter. Audrey's students learn three soliloquies by the end of the quarter, which they can use for audition pieces, and they are videotaped at the beginning, middle, and end of the quarter. When the students comment on each other's performances, they pick two things that function well and two that need to be worked on (we were asked to make similar brief notes on each other's performances of scenes from Macbeth). Audrey showed us the minute-long scene from "Language and Character" with Roger Rees as Costard and we were charmed and amused. The second assignment had us stand up and declaim twice 3.5.36-55 of Henry V. Then Audrey showed us this speech as John Barton performs it with his round vowels and admixture of British and American accents on "Language and Character." The third assignment was "a real killer and you need to try this to see this": the Archbishop's speech from Henry V, 1.2.33-95. We could read this a little more quietly. Many productions would edit this speech. Julia recalled a Shenandoah Express production in which the Archbishop, for a humorous effect, moved into the audience, addressing individual members as if he were quizzing them on their knowledge of history. Audrey showed us the scene with Tony Church performing it with comic effect on "Set Speeches and Soliloquies." For the fourth assignment, we counted off in pairs to read Twelfth Night, 2.4.15-41. Audrey asked what we would want from a director. Caroline asked if this was addressed to the audience; how much sadness or humor is in this passage; do they touch? how close are they? Ed said that the character pursues an objective but covers that. Eric asked where are the musicians? do they hear and react? Paul said this is the opening of the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two people. Edward asked if Orsino is paying attention; is this comic? We watched the scene between Judi Dench and Richard Pasco in "Rehearsing the Text." Julia asked for strategies for teaching verse reading to inexperienced students. Audrey said to suggest to the student, "How about if you stressed that word?" Caroline said the instructor could model a speech in three different ways (angrily, quietly, etc.), letting the students direct the instructor. The question of pauses came up. The ACTER troupe urged us to keep the verse going, not to pause. Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in Macbeth allowed themselves more pauses. Audrey said this may have to do with ranking in the pecking order but also with experience in acting and freedom in exploration; the ACTER troupe had the urgency of performing the whole play with only five actors. Audrey likes to use the Folio and Quarto punctuation to see the shape of the speech, to try this for a time and then do a variation. American actors, bred in realistic theater, make the lines too slow as they pause too often. Ed said that the advice is to punch the end word, but also flow to the next word. Audrey said that the American natural mode is one of falling inflection that soothes and reassures; that's why she had us do exercises with kicking and throwing as we said the last word in a line. The ACTER troupe gave language the highest priority, acting with the body neutral. Bertram Joseph wrote that Elizabethan ministers used rhetoric and body awareness in their sermons as they preached. Audrey gave us a two-page handout with what she modestly called "simplistic" notes on comedy that use the elements of wit, humor, satire, sarcasm, irony, farce, burlesque, and slapstick. STAGE POSITIONS After lunch, the five Theatre Department people--Ed, Eric, Julia, Kurt, and Paul--went up on the As You Like It stage. Audrey asked us to look for what is the strongest position on stage. That was dead center, down front. The rest of this was not so definite. They made entrances from the sides, diagonally, and center upstage; they made exits the same way. Four gathered downstage left with Kurt at a diagonal; Kurt turned his back to us and Paul looked at us. Four sat around the bench downstage left and Kurt turned away from them, turned his head to them, turned his body to them. All five stood in a row upstage; one walked front center. Four lay down on the ground on one side; Ed turned, saw Julia, then saw them. These position reveal different situations. Audrey said this is puppet theater with limited range, but it's moving. Ed has his students find paintings and imitate the positions in the paintings of Botticelli and Da Vinci, for example. Audrey had the five use various levels as they stood, sat, and lay down; she said one could use the center aisle to break down the separation of audience and performance. When Audrey directs a play she asks where are the key moments and reserves the most important positions of the stage for those moments, so that a scene's theatricality is not nullified by the next spectacular moment but that weight is portioned out according to structure. American actors are used to one kind of playhouse and may need to be encouraged to look at upper levels to take in the whole audience. DIRECTING Audrey doesn't teach a class in directing because she agrees with John Houseman in his Foreword to Robert L. Benedetti's The Director at Work, that no one is qualified to direct who hasn't been an actor. Audrey's directing career started at the age of eight when she starred in and directed her friends in "The Tale of the Wicked Witch." John Houseman cites Peter Hall in a conversation with Peter Brook in which they agree that directors are moving away from the concept of autocratic interpreter to one of an athletic director and coach of a football team. The Royal Shakespeare Company has eight weeks of rehearsal, whereas Audrey has three weeks; ideally she would start with actors and then sort out sets and costumes, but the process doesn't usually work that way. She wistfully told us that the Oedipus at Colonus that she saw was seven years evolving; the Trevor Nunn Macbeth was three years in being stripped away to its essence. We stood up and flung our arms about until Audrey said "freeze" (pp. 68-69 of Peter Brook's There Are No Secrets). We did a counting game (pp. 66-7 of Brook), each of us counting off and trying to get to 26 without two people saying the same number simultaneously. Every time two people spoke up, we started back at number one. This teaches concentration. After perhaps five or ten minutes, Alan ended with number twenty-six and we applauded uproariously. Ed said that, in his experience, amazingly, after two hours of rehearsal, the actors complete this in one try, as their sense of concentration has improved. MORE ON DIRECTING Audrey said that the director must have from the start a formless hunch about the play; the play is calling to the director, who must be listening to hear what has been waiting to appear; then the director gives it visibility, pace, clarity, articulation, musicality, rhythm. Cezarija is reminded of a lecture that the poet William Stafford presented at St. Cloud State University in which he spoke about his writing process. He woke every morning at four A.M. (he had four children and he had to go to work) to write and in his composing, he behaved like an old hound dog sniffing into the wind and following the scent. Now, when Cezarija talks to her students about inspiration in the creative process, she talks about the Muse and also the humble hound dog. Audrey talked about the core of As You Like It, Hymen, the god of marriage, and while three of the four couples might be divorced eventually, the play is a celebration of marriage. She had wanted a fifth couple from the audience (newlyweds or a couple renewing their vows) to come on-stage to break down the barrier between performer and audience, so the whole theater would be embraced in the celebration of marriage; this has not yet been realized in a production. When Audrey analyzes a play she asks what is the most important essence of a play, what is its climax and often works backward from that. But Audrey works lovingly with actors: one Hermione was having difficulty with the statue scene. Audrey told her, "You don't have to come alive," which set up tension in the scene. Michael wondered if Peter Brook seems in his writing not to have a concept of the play before he begins rehearsal. Audrey spoke about the paradox by which the director absorbs the play, and then the play comes out of the director, just as the actor does the word work, and then the words and scene come out of the actor. Audrey said that actors can dislike a director and can still do great work; some directors are in it for power and relish making an actor cry. Ed said that a good director creates a scaffolding that is to be completed by everyone else. Dan asked how much of the scaffolding is revealed to the actors. Audrey said they discuss the world of the play; what is the meaning of the play; where are the gods; where is justice. Other directors ask actors to paraphrase their lines or discuss the meaning of the scene. The question arose, What happens when actors resist? In that situation, Audrey says, "Let's try it your way; let's try it another way. What are the gains and losses?" Paul agreed that actors have to take a proprietary interest in making it work, so the director should ask the right question, rather than arguing concept with the actor. Kurt's concern was urgency: "Maybe I'm the kind of director that we're abusing right now but I frequently find himself in the situation that while there are lots of interesting choices, we're going to have to start down one path pretty fast." Julia said this is a matter of trust; just as students fear a final so do actors fear a failure; a director could tell student actors, "I'm not going to let you look stupid out there." Alan said the word "trust" keeps coming up, a word that came up with Deborah Warner's production of Titus Andronicus at the Swan (see Alan C. Dessen. "Trusting the Script: Deborah Warner at the Swan." Titus Andronicus. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. 51-69). Eric said that exercises at the beginning could create an ensemble, a community to belong to rather than not belong to, which would shape the world of the play. Audrey suggested playing music at rehearsal, dancing, and clowning. Edward said this is the craft of directing, but good directing is not a codification of rules. Audrey described and/or passed around copies of useful books: Benedaetti, Robert L. The Director at Work. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. NY: Penguin, 1968. Brook, Peter. There Are No Secrets. 1993. Dean, Alexander, and Lawrence Carra. Fundamentals of Play Directing. 4th ed. NY: Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. Goodman, Randolph. From Script to Stage: Eight Modern Plays. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Hodges, Francis. Play Directing--Analysis, Communication, and Style. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982. Donald A. Schon. Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987. Donald A. Schon, ed. The Reflective Turn: Case Studies in and on Educational Practice. NY: Teachers College Press, 1991. Eric added a title: Hornby, Richard. Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production. Austin: U of Texas P, 1977. Edward recommended: Johnstone, Keith. Impro. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1988. Alan passed around one of Michael's books: Warren, Michael. The Parallel King Lear 1608-1623. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Kurt reminded us how to get access to Lois Potter's electronic workbooks. If you subscribe to SHAKSPER, don't put anything on the subject line and type: get perform1 seminar get perform2 seminar get perform3 seminar get perform4 seminar get perform5 seminar get perform6 seminar get perform7 seminar get perform8 seminar ON BEING A TEXTUAL CONSULTANT / DRAMATURG We had a coffee break and came back at about 4 for a session with Michael on textual consultation. Michael prefers being textual consultant to being dramaturg. The position provides a place "to ask questions, but not the obligation to be a nuisance." He is present at every one of the seven or so rehearsals and sits to the side, feeling that the more unobtrusive he is, the more helpful he can be. The textual consultant is not the director, and the interpersonal dynamics requires tact and subtlety to avoid being perceived as a potential threat; one can perhaps make extraordinarily tentative suggestions in the guise of questions ("Could this line mean...?"). This role in the company is not even secondary but tertiary at best. English teachers are used to primary roles, especially in straightening out theatre people, but Michael has come to enjoy his role in the production as "a kind of fetish or good luck charm." Before the rehearsal, he sent articles to the director about what text to use, about interpretations or history, and during the rehearsal, he sent odd screeds and letters as reminders about phrasing, these "in writing that can be torn up and thrown away." Such a role is "a study in being silent," a "position of helpful neutrality." It did have rewards for Michael: it provided the understanding of options about bodies in motion that were not present in the literature class; it raised questions--about the opening of Measure for Measure, Paul Whitworth, a great asker of questions, asked what the social relations between the characters are and what does Escalus know; it made one more precise as one noticed the modes of address and gave attention to rank; while literary critics may have a vision of particular figures, theater practitioners have to embody the figures, and this embodiment starts in the act of casting, in seeing, for example, how old these figures are; "the experience of watching the rehearsal process makes one dissatisfied with what one has said about it"--it restores the anti-reductive position in one's life, renders one less reductive; when Michael was textual consultant for a production of a conflated King Lear, he noticed that the Director would start with cuts, but in the course of rehearsal, some of the cuts were restored (Michael expects to preside someday over a production that will have the textual variants as supertitles electrified above the stage). Paul said that directors usually trim the text before rehearsal, but the better practice may be to cut lines well into the rehearsal. Michael also wrote program notes of 1000 to 1,500 words for the production--the largest readership but the hardest writing he's done because the essay was written before the rehearsal began. Kurt said that a dramaturg was helpful at the start but trickier toward the end when the play is evolving. Michael said the title of dramaturg has too much authority; the dramaturg is a scholarly resource to be plundered, rather than watered and nurtured as valuable. Dan has been the dramaturg for the Theatre Department's productions; and he and the director discussed the play scene by scene and line by line before casting began. Eric said that what is important to the director is to be surrounded by people that he or she trusts. Paul invites colleagues from other departments to provide information on different times and places; he brings in different translations of plays if they are available. In the course of doing textual consultation, Michael learned that he knew a lot less than he thought he did. Alan, now a theatrical producer himself with the ACTER troupe, agreed that he'd reduced his expectations from working with interpretations down to words, finally coming to rest at stage directions. Clare recommended a book about the relationship between playwright and director: Jones, David. Making Plays: The Writer-Director Relationship in the Theater Today. Winchester: Faber & Faber, 1995. Someone (who?) recommended a book in which the last chapter is about the production of Tom Stoppard's play: Gaskell, Philip. From Writer to Reader. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1987. We had a dinner break and went to see the Interact production of As You Like It at the Folger Theatre. Saturday, April 27 In the morning, after coffee and pastries in the Board Room, Michael assigned us to four groups to rehearse for about 20 minutes. -Romeo and Juliet, 2.6 Quarto 1 (1597) and Quarto 2 (1599) versions Quarto 2 is the version that's usually played. Juliet doesn't necessarily go to Romeo first but perhaps first to the Friar, who holds them apart, not allowing them to touch until the end; Juliet maybe is not running but walking shyly, tentatively to the Friar. In Quarto 1 Juliet addresses Romeo immediately, and there is action and lots of potential for comedy; Q1 is not an imperfectly remembered construction of Q2, for it has a different mood, a kind of exuberance rather than the apprehension of Q2. -Othello, 4.3 Quarto 1 (1622) Quarto 1 does not have Desdemona's willow song nor Emilia's last 20-line speech on women's rights and behavior. Miranda said that Q1 is bleaker than the Folio because Emilia doesn't get it; Desdemona is more isolated. Alan said Desdemona is never alone on-stage, and here she is with a woman, not a man. The building of Emilia's character starts here. Paul said that perhaps the actor didn't have the voice to sing the willow song. Eric said that would have been even more painful. Michael said that music today slows down the scene. The Folio version with the willow song was not performed this morning, although Michael suggested doing the Folio version as a satyr play after A Chaste Maid that evening: Othello and A Chaste Maid, a double-header. -Coriolanus, 1.1.1-98 Folio (1623) Michael said that the group playing the company of mutinous citizens would probably have the most fun. Paul, who was playing Menenius, saw William's prop from the night before and wanted to placate the hungry citizens and improve their mood: "I was so tempted. The lamb was backstage. Here's chops for all!" But the group valiantly resisted this impulse and performed the Folio as printed. After Menenius enters, the Second Citizen takes the role of the forceful speaker; all editions assume this is a mistake and change him to the First Citizen. Bob said that the First Citizen, a member of the proletariat, may have knowledge of Menenius' status and realize that when Menenius shows up, the possibility of success is over. Clare said that the Second Citizen could be of the middle class, a gentleman able to talk to a patrician. Paul said that perhaps Menenius elects the Second Citizen as spokesman. Michael said perhaps the First Citizen is a natural rabble-rouser and the Second is a civil servant. Edward said that who is carrying arms might be an issue. Bob said there is diversity within the group of citizens. Michael said a monolithic group is less interesting; the fundamentals of human conflict are much more evident than the possibility of human harmony. Alan said perhaps the First Citizen exits to come back as one of the two tribunes. Ed said one of the crowd might be more likely to double the part. Edward said perhaps the First Citizen passes the baton to the Second Citizen. Paul said perhaps Menenius invites the Second Citizen to be the speaker. Tom said perhaps the crowd protects the First Citizen because they know he's a firebrand. Michael said that editorial interference is not always necessary, and if you can do without it, so much the better; the editor becomes just another collaborator. Michael showed us videotapes of three versions of the opening of A Midsummer Night's Dream: Peter Hall's 1968 version is a cheerful one done outside a house in Stratford; the BBC version shows an unhappy Hippolyta with no variation in pace; the Santa Cruz presentation allowed us to see performers reacting to the audience. Michael showed us two versions of Titus Andronicus (3.1.150-206)--BBC and Santa Cruz--but a lengthier discussion was cut off by the need for our morning snacks. About 11:20 in the Board Room, we began our discussion of the previous night's performance of As You Like It.. SHAKESPEARE AS PLACEMAT and THE AUDIENCE'S SUBJECTIVITY Alan asked how do we use imperfectly realized productions of plays we take our students to see; how do we deal with students' reactions? Tom said he asks students to list five things they liked and five things they disliked; eventually they would see more Shakespeare and be able to discriminate. Caroline would like to show students a video, but there is no uniformly good video of this play. Kurt said that we often teach that film is better than live theater and should not; students mistakenly assume that there is a right tradition that is pretty and painless. Caroline said that they could discuss the darker elements that are absent from this production. Alan asked how do you avoid telling the students, "You liked this but you're dumb for liking this?" Paul would avoid asking them what they liked and instead ask students what they remembered, what they saw, and what, alternatively, might have been done. Audrey might start with a positive approach, saying a given production is clearly told, a storybook one could take children to but that there is an approach fitter for older audiences. Sheila said that students accuse us of picking things apart. Bob said we need to say that their emotional reactions are not pertinent to class discussion or to theater. Edward said that we could ask students to write down emotions first in journal form, then afterward ask if their feelings have changed because of the discussion. Bill would ask them what they think; taking apart an inadequate performance empowers students. Eric would say, "Well, you saw this and how would you cast your ideal performance?" Audrey would encourage further exploration with "Let's continue looking at the text and see what more we can discover, what more we can see." Edward said the instructor can bring in reviews and suggested Ken Davis' Rehearsing the Audience. Julia suggested inviting the students to refer to the details of staging. Ed suggested asking how the production achieves certain effects. Sheila suggested assigning individual students to track particular characters. Students might imagine a dark AYLI and then a happy AYLI. Dan would ask students before the performance to write down what is the central scene and what is one scene they don't understand; after the performance they can write a paragraph in response to their own questions. Caroline would ask, "What did you see? Whose financial and political interests does this serve?" Alan asked, What kind of audience does this assume? Paul said audience members saw the same thing but felt differently about it; there's also a danger in over-preparing students so they have a specific set of expectations; how we feel is biased by a number of factors which can both cloud and inform the issue. Miranda said that preparation was good and Alan said that indoctrination was bad. AMATEUR THEATER Bob asked if community theater or student theater were worth the time, energy and work. Ellen said that students get impassioned as they perform it and some audience members enjoy it and become passionate devotees. Kurt said, "My students do better with amateurs than with professionals. They see this is possible." Paul said the lesson could be that just because it's professional doesn't mean it's excellent. Miranda said, "I worry that they'll hate a good production rather than love a bad production." Sheila said that her mother took the four children to see a production of Twelfth Night at the University of Puget Sound because that was what was affordable. Bob asked what responsibility we have, what opportunities are there to bring Shakespeare to the high schools. Edward said there are festivals and competitions in high schools. Alan raised questions specific to AYLI: How are you going to distinguish between the court and the forest; how do you play literary shepherds; how do you play the famous speeches; how do you play the scene with William (and often he doubles in the part of Charles); how is the banquet staged; how are the scenes re-sequenced? Caroline said that the program notes suggest this is about the fantasies of love; and what is today's equivalent for the conventions of the pastoral--Bride Magazine? Julia asked where, what, and when is the forest of Arden; how do we know; what is the season. Edward asks students to write a dialogue if there are conflicted emotions (When they are studying Julius Caesar, what would you do to convince your friend to commit a crime? What would it be like to woo someone if you were disguised? What are the advantages and disadvantages?). Alan finally shared with us that his favorite comma is in AYLI, in Hymen's next-to-last line (5.4.143): "That reason, wonder may diminish." Which is it, reason or wonder? In that ambiguity lies the whole play. Michael offered Rosalind's line, "O Jupiter, how weary are my spirits" (2.4.1); "weary" is "merry" in the Folio--to ambiguate matters deliciously. And then we broke for lunch. At 2:00 we had our business session on The Project and May. The activities we may pursue: warm-ups; rehearsal, performance, and discussion of scenes; Audrey's help with each scene on-stage to open up another dimension; Audrey may direct two scenes in front of all of us, so that we can see the process of directing. For the Project, the minutes could include a sentence or two on the visiting contributors; Miranda volunteered to provide brief descriptions of the productions we saw. We came up with the chapter headings for the pedagogical resource/ recipe book: writing prompts, performance exercises, warm-up games, improvisation, textual exercises, video & film performance analysis, live performance analysis, slides and visual material (collages, objects), Shakespeare's language (scansion, diction), voice & body exercises. TAKING STOCK At 4:15 we convened in the Board Room. Miranda said that next year's SAA will meet in Washington, and we are all invited to a reunion at what will be her remodeled house. Caroline raised the question of time spent on teaching plays: to spend more time on one play will mean cutting out one or two plays. Next year, in a ten-week quarter, instead of teaching six plays, she will teach four--Macbeth, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and one other that the students will vote on (A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Henry IV, Part One, or Romeo and Juliet). Clare teaches seven plays in fifteen weeks; she used to do eleven plays, and it succeeded--with videos, not performance work; but even seven is too many if you include performance work; students can take another course to read more Shakespeare; she'll do what she's strong at and coordinate the course with the theatre department. Bob will propose a class in performing Shakespeare. Miranda will propose an advanced Shakespeare class with more performance work. Bill teaches about five plays and has a video night during which he shows the play; if students can't come to that night they can watch the video, which is placed on reserve; he would like to teach one play in the four-week summer session. THEATRE AND ENGLISH Clare participated in a project with four faculty from Theatre and seven from English, in which they acted in key scenes that were videotaped; the discussions about the performances were also taped, with questions from the audience; this videotaped project (three 40-minute tapes) is made available to high schools, so that students can see colleagues disagreeing in a courteous and excited way about Shakespeare. Bob interviews local directors on video. Ed said that Theatre departments get pressure from English not to teach Shakespeare. Kurt said that Theatre departments usually lose against English departments. Dan serves as dramaturg for Theatre productions. Paul has team-taught with people in other fields and invites guests to his classes to remind students there is more than one expert. Alan enjoys the new energy and rhythm that a guest brings to a class. WHAT SHOULD WE DO IF OUR STUDENTS OBJECT? Ed has already used Audrey's techniques for analyzing speeches as preparation for acting, once piecemeal, and another time all at once, and he testified to the success of the exercises; he also said he's not tenured and cannot afford a sulky class. Dan found that his upper-division majors sulk at having to do warm-ups and physical work and want lectures on Shakespeare. Kurt said that Theatre students resist content and want the official meaning of this script. Edward said he would tell students they are learning a content as well as learning how to learn; if students resist, ask them to write in a journal, "Pretend you're me; what is it you think I'm doing"; a clear and full course outline tells students what to expect. Alan said if you change your product, you have to be aware of previous expectations. Audrey said change the time of the course if you will try something new. Caroline said tell the students, "This is cutting-edge stuff I'm letting you in on; and there's also performance theory, if a theoretical approach is needed." Audrey said she sits with six students in a circle and asks, What is it you want in this class? VARIOUS ASSIGNMENTS Audrey has students put characters from Shakespeare on trial. Ellen requires students to memorize a poem; she says "I will help you memorize it for writing it on the final (not performing it)" by means of paraphrase and meter; "and now they'll never forget it." Tom used Paul's syllabus with its various issues for the research paper; this summer he's driving his students to see six plays, and maybe a seventh. Cezarija requires students to write a one-page journal (ungraded but required) on each act, which she collects every day at the beginning of class and returns at the next class period; that way she knows students are reading the play and are ready to discuss it and ask questions; she writes only positive comments on the journal responses, so students are less afraid of responding to Shakespeare emotionally. Bob asks his students to imagine what a scene looks like, to describe what the bodies are doing, what the facial expressions and gestures are and what the non-human elements on-stage look like. Edward said that Miriam Gilbert makes her students the dramaturg who must justify and make a coherent argument about cuts in the text. Alan asks students to write short papers arguing pro and con about the rearrangement of scenes in Act 2 or 4.2 of As You Like It, for example; or should Sir Walter Blunt's body be on-stage or be taken off in Henry IV, Part One. Audrey asks what is the key scene in the play and what is the structure the student sees. ON HEIGHTENED EMOTIONS AND OTHER THINGS Julia said that some of her students in Intermediate Acting where heightened style, language, and physicality are explored, were frightened of being that big, of aspiring to the size of those scenes, that rhetoric. Audrey said that women are often afraid to vent anger and men often fail to acknowledge tears. Eric said that in a discussion of the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream, when the class was exclusively women, they expressed their anger about Hippolyta's silence. Eric liked Michael Freedman's comment about not being afraid of making a fool of yourself. Clare has students direct each other in scene work. Audrey tells students that part of their evaluation will be on the oral contribution to the class, a contribution in ideas (not acting) to the scene work. Miranda took a course in Model Mugging in which she was taught to shout "No" as she delivered blows to the assailant. Audrey shouted "How dare you!" at someone who moved the garbage bins. Alan said he would've been properly intimidated. Dear Friends, we hope we have not conflated your ideas, or mangled your statements, or killed your words. But if we have, collaborate with us and repair our errors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shakespeare Examined Through Performance Minutes: Chapter Nine 17-18 May 1996 by Paul Nelsen Friday 17 May We entered in ones and twos through the silver steel doors to assemble in the familiar foyer and commune with customary coffee, cake, and conversation. Huddles form for exchange of merry tidings and resonant murmur soon fills the wide vessel of the lobby. Some shy from talk to hover at the edge of conviviality or wander through the hall in reflective solitude. Shared awareness that this is our final weekend adds undertones to felicitous chatter or sporadically erupts in bittersweet groans. The nine o'clock session is a tad tardy in starting. Reluctant to begin our endings, we slouched into the cave, collected our handouts, and plopped our butts onto the purple upholstery. Alan opened the prologue by acknowledging Ed Isser's clean shaven younger brother "Ted." Cezarija re-urged everyone to submit a list of five favorite books or current reading to Paul for collation and dissemination with the May minutes. Kurt proudly announced the appointment of Prof. Julia Matthew's to the faculty of Kennesaw State College -- news gleefully applauded by all with congratulatory best wishes to Julia. Alan proposed a plan of attack for the weekend's agenda. He suggested the late morning session be devoted to organizing ourselves for an afternoon of editing "projects" and "recipes" plus determining what else we want to generate for publication in the chronicles of our institute. Tom had already made great strides in formatting everyone's submissions, but our goal, Alan suggested, should be to have all documents polished for final printing by the end of =46riday afternoon. If need be, Alan cautioned, time could be carved out of Saturday's schedule to complete tasks related to packaging a finished volume. The triangular facets of our weekend's formal agenda included editorial and other composition work associated with accomplishing the chronicle, an examination of Volpone and its performance at the Lansburg, and closing sessions related to acting and scene presentations. The weekend's finale would include a Saturday night f=EAte to take place in a nearby Folger apartment, which we were grateful to have made available for such use. Kathleen collected payments to cover party expenses. Attention turned to Volpone. Alan prefaced discussion with selected comments and queries. Although "no other playwright has suffered from not being Shakespeare more than Ben Jonson," Alan's own high regard for Jonson is not universally shared by his students. Why? He suggested that examination of Jonson can be "useful to us as a way of testing what we know or think we know about Shakespeare." How familiar are we with the range of plays within the Jonsonian canon and the features of their dramaturgy? Does Jonson offer us an alternative or complementary model upon which to build understanding of the "norms" of Elizabethan drama? Alan noted distinguishing circumstances about Jonson's professional career. Although both Jonson and Shakespeare may have come to the theatre first as itinerant actors, Shakespeare became a "sharer," writing expressly for his own company and playhouse(s). Jonson tailored some of his plays for specific companies, stages, or for court commissions, but he remained a "freelance," an independent dramatist and masque jobber. Shakespeare made no effort to see his plays into print. Jonson's 1616 Folio represented a major landmark in publishing and surely induced Heminges and Condell to produce the First Folio. Alan drew attention to how Jonson's incipient awareness of his own authority may be signaled by the typographical predominance given to his name on the title page of the quarto Volpone. Somehow Jonson secured rights to his plays from the theatre companies and "may have fussed over preparing them for readers" -- apparently thinking about how a script must be modeled for readership. Alan's studies of differences between quarto and Folio renditions of Every Man Out of His Humour indicate that J. "clearly transformed" the later authorized version to serve a reader's imagination. "There is something different here than with Shakespeare. Shakespeare seemed content to see himself as a man of the theatre. Jonson wanted to see himself (and be seen) as a dramatist." Alan cautioned that we do not know what was included in the original acting parts of Volpone. Stage directions that appear in modern editions are either drawn from Jonson's Folio or are devised by latter-day editors as reader aids. Before moving on to examine scenes through readings, Alan noted that another major difference between S. and J. has to do with attachments to "genre." Jonson wrote no histories. His two tragedies are admired "only by specialists." Although there are romance elements in the comedies, Jonson subordinated romance to emphasis on satire, an interest in plays of ideas. How do we assay Jonsonian satire? Alan observed that questions of "tone" -- how broadly cartooned or psychologically realistic characters and action are rendered in stage performance -- have significant bearing on the slant of interpretation. For example, he asked us to examine the range of interpretive possibilities a production can bring to dimensioning portrayal of Volpone, as pivotal figure in the action, and the whole gallery of scamps and gulls with whom he interacts. Alan circulated copies of three scenes offering problematic moments for staging and characterization. Alan commented on how critical/interpretive views of Celia have changed during the past two decades. Is she merely a ditsy morsel of flesh and a cog in the comic machinery or is she virtuous prey and potential victim of dark designs? In Act 3 scene 7, Alan pointed out the number of dashes in Celia's speech (lines 239-258) and questioned how they might be played. After reading the scene, Ellen observed that the dashes could call for a fragmentation of mind in distress or alternatively they might also suggest physical business -- parries of Volpone's advances in a classic chase scene. Edward asked whether Celia is qualitatively changed here. Audrey recalled revelations drawn from the experience of directing The Alchemist. She suggested actually playing the scene in the style of Feydeau farce (which was tried), offering the view that in many ways Jonson's animated theatricality was more akin to French burlesque than English comedy. Clare proposed that the tone within the scene could modulate and that the action did not have to be limited to devices of stock farce or chilling portrayal of psychological terror. Others acknowledged the viability of playing the comic against the serious. Celia's pleading at line 255 even suggests a possible transition of tone and sets up Volpone's callous rejection of Celia's entreaty. Alan commented on the dramatic effect of a villain played in a way to utterly charm us for most of the action who then does something that carries beyond the edge of droll roguery and repels us as reprehensible and unpardonable. This central scene provides pivotal moments of character and thematic definition. Alan also drew attention to questions surrounding Bonario's seemingly melodramatic "Forbeare, foule ravisher . . . " entrance. Alan laid out the elaborate circumstances that Jonson dramaturgically contrived to poise Bonario for the rescue -- how Volpone's and Mosca's aims are confounded by their own machinations. But how does this moment come off on stage? Is it a laughably meta-theatrical deus ex arras intervention? Or can it work as a powerful reversal -- the truth of Volpone's duplicity now witnessed, and all his venal designs "un-masqu'd, un-spirited, un-done" and thus now ruined? The second scene submitted for assessment, the first court scene (4.4), focused attention on the question of "what happens to cause the Avocatori to change their minds?" Alan pointed out that, once again, stage interpretation can resonate in different "tones." Is Voltore's argument played-up as eloquently persuasive? Are the Avocatori credulous boobies? Or dirty-old-men themselves with guilty consciences -- "Which of you are safe. . . "(42-3)? What is the object of satire here? Julia argued that the goal of the play is "to move us to moral knowledge" by provoking us into "reacting negatively to deceit." The moral compass of the satire embraces more than a lampoon of (in)justice. Other comments were made about how staging details (How do we view Volpone and/or Celia-Bonario?) and casting choices (How many Avocatori are there? How old are they? Are they all men?) can influence reception. Alan remarked that the tone of presentational choices can lead us in various directions. We then read the first hundred lines or so from the concluding scene, 5.12. The issues here were "tone" related also: how heavily should the disposition of poetic justice be laid on? Ed Isser emphasized that the finale has to maintain a glow of comic brightness, that the exposition of dark duplicity should not bleakly overshadow the exoneration of Celia/Bonario and the restoration of order. Alan agreed that the challenge of Jonson is double-edged: "You have to get the fun but you also have to find the bite of the satire." Is the audience's sense of moral conscience meant to be implicated in righteous messages delivered by the ending? Or are we meant to perceive the punishment of Volpone and Mosca as just deserts for heinous malefactors? Edward Rocklin (alluding to ideas of Richard Dutton) suggested that Jonson employed a complex strategy directed at his English audiences -- seducing them into scorning the decadent Italian scoundrels yet, by the end, trapping them into seeing the satire as directed against themselves. Again, Alan invited us to recognize the range of interpretive takes this play invites. He then circulated copies of a "Short Assignment on Volpone" that he uses successfully in class. Transcript is as follows: The 1607 Quarto of Volpone has 0 stage (not even an enter); the version in the 1616 Folio inserts a few marginal signals. Consider what is 5.11 in Herford and Simpson (based on the 1616 scene divisions) 0r 5.6 in Fraser & Rabkin (p. 96) and most modern editions. Given Jonson's neo-classical practice, neither Q nor F provides and exit or exeunt at the end of the scene, including the end of 5.10 (your 5.50, even when the stage has been cleared. In setting up your version of p. 96, what if anything would you add at the end of the previous court scene (your 5.5) and at the beginning of the next court scene (your 5.7)? E.g., Fraser inserts [Exeunt] at the end of his 5.5 after Corvino's "And credit nothing . . . " speech; in his 1968 Fountainwell edition Jay Halio inserts [The scene closes.] and cites (p. 139) Gifford, a 19th-century editor, who argues "Since the scene is shortly resumed, the characters remain as in tableau while scene xi is acted at one side of the stage." What difference does your choice make? What are the implications of this choice for performance and interpretation? Eleven o'clock session "What shall we do this afternoon?" Tom reported on and produced what he had nobly put together so far -- all submitted material had been processed into uniform style and format. He had printed two copies of all documents, including nearly a hundred "recipe" entries. He suggested that one set be proofread and marked-up by editors and that the other set be preserved as control copy. The main question with the recipes was how to categorize them in a coherent way. Alan noted that Lena had completed a two page introduction linking our program to the NEH, and that he had written brief introductory comments, and that Audrey would contribute her own. Tom asked how we wanted to handle biographies. Consensus was quickly asserted: just list names and institutional affiliations for the formal publication. Bill announced that completion of videotapes that correlate to his project had been delayed due to technical difficulties. The obstacles complicating the printing of finished copies by the end of the weekend were noted -- the portable printers we had available are very slow; the Folger's laser printer is not compatible with Macintosh. The sense of the group was that we would vigorously pursue getting a master copy ready for print by the end of the afternoon but that we would not be troubled if complete copies for everyone were not bound and ready to take home with us by the end of Saturday. Concern was raised about how printing and distribution exigencies might inconvenience the Folger staff. Tom also requested that, if he is successful in setting up a Web site, he would need to hear from anyone about any specific pieces that s/he does not want to be included for web access. Ed expressed concern about possible copyright restriction and source citations. Alan responded saying all citations should follow "fair use" guidelines and procedures. Alan raised the question again of how we can stay in touch. He noted that many of us, but not all, are members of SAA and that next year's conference (March 26-30) is slated to convene in D.C.. Audrey and Alan urged that we should organize a reunion during that weekend and that they hoped all would be able to attend. Miranda offered to advise on details of how to join the SAA and participate in the conference. A sense of gratitude to the NEH was brought forward. Kurt mentioned that funding of the Endowments beyond 1997 was still very much in jeopardy and a chorus of laments ensued, objecting to the withdrawal of government support for worthy programs such as our own. Kurt invited instituters to participate in a colloquium on Macbeth -- a scholarly exchange offered in conjunction with his production of the Scottish play -- at Kennesaw the weekend of November 7th next fall. Ed Isser noted that performances of his production of Measure for Measure at Holy Cross are scheduled for the same weekend. Dan announced that he, Clare, Ed, Edward, Ellen, and Paul had begun discussions of a joint book project focusing on iteroretive cruxes of Measure and summoned others to come aboard. Tom drew attention to publication possibilities in the journal, Shakespeare and Film, and Paul reminded all about similar prospects with Shakespeare Bulletin. Audrey urged people who could to attend the Shakespeare Santa Cruz conference -- dates were not at hand but she indicated it would take place during the second week of August. Caroline circulated a pad asking everyone to list addresses, phone numbers, and birthdays. Just as we were drawing the morning sessions to an end, Alan reported that Sir Ian McKellan was in the hall and that Rebecca had suggested to him that we might be willing to admit him in to have a look at the stage. There being no objections, we were soon treated to a cordial, informal exchange with a great and gracious actor. Perhaps we should have invited him to banquet with us over lunch. Friday afternoon We assembled in the Board Room and broke down into small groups to tackle the proofing and editing of documents. Tom took the helm at his Powerbook. Bit by bit pieces were proofed, corrected and turned over to Tom to enter on the computer files. Caroline took charge of organizing recipes into coherent categories. Although several of the recipes seemed to bridge categories, choices were made and recipes were bundled into clusters. As anticipated, the completion of finished copy was inhibited by printer limitations. Before the end of the afternoon -- with proofreading, editing, and compilation tasks all done -- we agreed that Tom (who volunteered to do so) could finish entering emendations and print a polished master copy much more expediently by using proper equipment back at home. Dan would put finishing touches on the Measure study guide. Copies of the collected projects and recipes would be distributed from the Folger in a couple of weeks. Everyone ably contributed to making the editing process proceed without trauma but we were especially grateful to Tom for his yeoman efforts. The afternoon's work session dissolved and everyone took a break before our evening outing to see Volpone at the Lansburg. Saturday nine o'clock Following morning munches and chat in the "Ann Hathaway Gallery," we gathered on stage. Announcements included distribution by Kathleen of a complex logistical chart for afternoon rehearsal rotations which provided all scene partners a chance to work with Audrey in the theatre plus spaces in which to rehearse during specified time slots through the course of the early afternoon. We would collectively convene again in the theatre for a final showcase of all scenes. Audrey then took us through some morning warmups, reviewing several of the voice/body exercises we had done during prior months. Two scene pairings had asked Audrey to rehearse them, and two individuals had requested Audrey's help with monologues. At the end of the April weekend, Ed Isser had suggested the value of observing Audrey work with actors in a rehearsal style context. Caroline began with Hermione's defense monologue from Act III of Winter's Tale (3.2.91-116). Bob assisted playing Leontes. Following Caroline's first playing of the speech, Audrey asked Bob to help with a physicalization exercise we all had experienced before: Caroline propelled thoughts toward an imaginary Leontes while trying to drive her body forward as Bob restrained her labors at movement from behind. Audrey values this rehearsal exertion as a way of getting voice and feeling "into the whole body." Caroline then explored ways of locating the emotional facets of the speech within the context of the scene. Audrey counseled against inclination to enclose herself in internalized feelings of anguish -- Hermione's suffering of false accusation and "loss of babies." "Plead your case to all assembled," Audrey urged. "Argue methodically like a lawyer. Look for development of various emotional layers in the speech . . . " but "connect links in the emotional chain" and look for response support from listeners. Audrey then worked with Ed and Julia on their Angelo-Isabella scene from Measure for Measure (2.4.22-201). Audrey again focused attention to context, the identification and clarification of "steps" along the emotional path. Responding to Ed's first intimate rendering of Angelo's soliloquy, Audrey advocated letting more feeling ring in the voicing. Further work reflected upon a set of questions: "What happens to Angelo when Isabella is announced? Some physical stirring of the spirit? What are the signals that reveal Angelo's repressed longings? How does restraint of physical intimidation of Isabella factor into the picture -- if Angelo is less predatory how does this alter our perception of Isabella's reactions? Ed had included active business of knotting and fixing a knit tie around his neck as significant action in the scene. Audrey observed that it provided a marvelous image but the busy action may call too much attention to itself (becoming a scene about a tie) and obscure the emotional substructure. Kurt and Paul were next in presenting their Brutus/Cassius scene from the opening act of Julius Caesar (1.2.25-177). Audrey's remarks addressed questions of characterization and relationship. What animal images come to mind with these characters? Is Cassius snake-like? How does Brutus respond to Cassius' maneuverings? Is this a scene of seduction? How can interpretive ideas about progression -- the steps in tempting Brutus to take action against Caesar -- be choreographed into staged movement and in the visual composition of moments? Is there a homoerotic element suggested in Cassius' relationship to Brutus? The session concluded with Audrey working with Clare's Isabella soliloquy. Here Audrey's responses concentrated upon the passion/coolness dichotomy in acting. Observing Clare's emotive, reflexive intensity, Audrey suggested "Just think the argument." Do we achieve a clearer connection to the emotional subtext if the words are spoken as an attempt to reason coolly in the presence of deeply held but restrained passionate feeling? When is it appropriate to release emotion into gestures of speech/sound or action? When it comes to ventilating passion, frequency, duration, intensity, variety, and position of releases in the overall progression of a speech/scene are all critically relevant issues the actor must examine. The exchanges with Audrey demonstrated parallels between an approach to directing methodology and practices of pedagogy. Probing scenes and characters with questions invites exploration of critical/interpretive possibilities. How the questions are framed can indeed impose limits on interpretation or, on the other extreme, throw explorations into a muddle of anything goes. Achieving a balance between constructive direction and responsive investigation is a challenge. Interrogatory processes can be employed to manipulate, but they also provide a dynamic method of critical exploration. Eleven o'clock session With our collection of capsule reviews of the Lansburg Volpone perused and in hand, we re-gathered forces for a post-mortem of the Michael Kahn production. Alan launched discussion by reading a clip from Lloyd Rose's Washington Post notice that heralded the production as "stylized, nasty, and absolutely delicious." A chorus of responsive groans was heard. Alan noted that none of our commentaries found the production "nasty" at all, or at least did not find it nasty enough. Furthermore, quite astoundingly he thought, no one even mentions the portrayal of the key role of Mosca. "If Mosca has no provocative presence," Alan remarked, "the production is not going to work." Key interpretive questions here are "Is Mosca plotting from the top -- improvised -- or is his cunning premeditated?" Edward noted that he uses those very questions to propel class debate. Audrey opined that the actor playing Mosca (Wallace Acton) lacked vocal command. Several commentators lamented that Mosca was merely an "elf-like" sycophant who did not resonate on stage as an agent of duplicity. Clare suggested that playing off Pat Carroll's "Pillsbury dough boy" Volpone, compromised potential of a provocative presence for Mosca. Bill agreed that Carroll appeared physically feeble and lacked any semblance of fox-like rapacity. Sheila remarked that she was "thrown off by the early bit of (Volpone) kissing Mosca on the lips." Is there some take on this master-servant relationship that we are supposed to latch on to here? Reacting to the stylized characterizations, Julia said that "we did not see the animals working -- the birds of prey were not predatory. We saw mannerisms; not intent." Others concurred that the bird images operated as mere sight gags and did not seem to fit into an integral interpretive pattern. As such, their mannerism ceased to be funny very soon after first sight. Alan turned attention back to an issue brought forward in yesterday's discussion: "This potentially nasty play is also a funny play. . . . How do we reconcile nastiness (such as in the treatment of Celia by Corvino) with the lightness?" Ellen responded saying that she "found the action strangely imbalanced. Men who treat their wives badly should be deplored --yes -- but the lust of greed lacks edge." The impulses behind the situations of comedy did not drive the action and failed to generate satirical resonance. Clare observed that the "Three zannies were the core delight of the production" but, while others enjoyed their antics, many found them to be excrescent rather than organic to the production scheme. Alan noted that "it is normal to pare down the Sir Pol. part" but he asked Miranda about motives behind the extent of the cuts. Miranda suggested company politics may have figured into the matter -- reining in an actor in the company who had become notorious for taking liberties with lines and improvising shtick. Audrey complained that "It was slow. Jonson should be animated, full of fun." She suggested connections between Jonsonian aesthetics and British pantomime. Other voices allowed that "drag show" elements might have been more evocative if thematically tied to a cogent production concept. Tom admired Kahn's penchant for detail but Edward added that Kahn's productions seem to be ornamented with "good bits" that do not necessarily tie into a coherent pattern. Eric agreed, stating that he has come away from Kahn's productions unclear about what the unifying sense of structure is supposed to be. Eric also registered disappointment that the production avoided topicality. Given the political ambiance of Washington, why don't they seize opportunity to link themes of venality, deceit, and corruption to the corridors of government. Miranda mentioned something about biting hands that feed. Dan admitted that he was more willing to accept this production's taking license with Jonson's script than he might be with analogous adulterations of Shakespeare. He allowed that the musical embellishments were entertaining. Clare also enjoyed the musical closure. Alan confessed that he resents "pumped-up endings" and having his "buttons pushed" by swelling strains of curtain-call music. Tom asked whether he was "the only one annoyed by synchronized clapping." Julia stated that she resents facile applause of sleazy gimmicks but believes strongly in the importance of reaching out to an audience to get them "involved." Also responding to cheap trix theatricality, Sheila marveled quizzically at the post-intermission mass entrance of characters marching on stage. Bill recalled the titillating effect of the staging of Celia's "strip tease." Others echoed a sense of repugnance at that seemingly gratuitous bit of "spectacle" noting that it appeared to have little connection to dramatic development of Volpone's lust and functioned more as a show stopper aimed at arousing audience prurient attention (or political indignation). Discourse swarmed around Kahn's directorial choices. Cezarija asked how we can know "what is accountable to a director." Answers touched on the sprawling array of choices a director makes, ineffable matters of style, and how production dynamics are always affected by various "limitations." Audrey stated that Kahn "has a knack for theatricality." Edward admitted that many of Kahn's flashy strokes "engage you with curiosity"-- what do they mean? Alan remonstrated that Kahn's gimmickry conveys "a disregard for the text." Bob complained that Kahn's garish showmanship often "blunts the edges" of issues -- provocative problems are occasionally paraded but not insightfully investigated -- and that thought is upstaged by spectacle. Carol added her impression that Kahn panders to audiences, banqueting bad taste with a "let them eat cake" view of aesthetic nutrition. Clare adjoined that although she wanted her "students to love Shakespeare" and classic drama -- and could thereby forgive devices that violate propriety of purism in favor of enlivening classics with imaginative panache -- she also wanted students "to recognize the hard parts." Dan asked what harm might be done to audiences by productions of great plays that take patronizing views of taste or by attitudes about playing down to the public's capacity for and interest in being intellectually, emotionally, spiritually challenged. Eric affirmed that "great theatre will survive in garages," that the panoply of production is not a proper measure of the power of performance. Caroline agreed but added there is "room for both" bare bones productions and boulevard fare. Ed alluded to Peter Brook's categories of "Holy Theatre" and "Deadly Theatre." Bill noted that he is endeared to garage theatre but also values the opportunity to see mature talent on big stages. Audrey expressed a "cris de coeur" that "audiences will respond to quality!!! We have got to improve the quality of theatre" by celebrating quality whenever it comes along -- if you see a good production make the effort to get others to it. Miranda observed that "celebrating great productions can involve risk" just as denigrating bad or mediocre theatre can, in the view of media critics, imperil the survival of live theatre. Ed defended the positive role "nasty" critics (e.g. John Simon) can play in maintaining standards of quality. Kurt observed that the critical acuity of audiences needs to be cultivated. Bob added that we need to distinguish between "quality and interpretation" -- a high quality production can send low messages. But who are the arbiters of quality and values? Dan admonished that "we should not emphasize the search for excellence alone but cultivate power of assessment." Edward urged that we do what we can to "expose younger audiences to the issues" and help build new foundations of support "from the youth." Appending another element to the discourse, Kurt, Clare, and Ed advocated the value of including faculty participation (as actors) in student productions as a means of fostering appreciation of qualitative and interpretive standards. Alan congratulated everyone on the quality and interpretive points of the discussion. Saturday afternoon Our final hours were dedicated to rehearsal and presentation of our scenes followed by reflective discussion of the learning experiences derived from scene work and the Institute as a whole. As noted before, the plan for the afternoon was to allow each scene group rehearsal time in satellite spaces complemented by a chance to cycle into the theatre for coaching session with Audrey. The profile of scenes and actors was: Taming of the Shrew 2.1.168-280 (Riverside) in four pairings and variations: Clare/Petruchio and Caroline/Katherine; Edward/Petruchio and Clare/Katherine; Caroline/ Katherine and Bob/Petruchio; plus Bob/Kate and Edward/Petruchio. Twelfth Night 2.4.88-137 (New Folger) with Miranda as Caesario/Viola and Sheila as Orsino. Measure for Measure 2.4.30-187 with Dan as Angelo and Ellen as Isabella. Twelfth Night 1.3.79-139 with Tom as Sir Toby and Bill and Sir Andrew. Measure for Measure 2.4.22-201 with Ed as Angelo and Julia as Isabella. Pericles 5.1.81-216 (excluding Helicanus and Lysimachus from "the Peter Alexander edition of the Complete Works") with Eric as Pericles and Cezarija as Marina. Julius Caesar 1.2.25-177 (Riverside with some cutting) with Kurt as Brutus and Paul as Cassius. At 3:30 we all gathered in the auditorium for the showcase of scenes. As we had done for the presentation of Macbeth scenes, everyone watching took notes for the performers and they were later distributed. Closing discussion Audrey's open-door question was, "What did we learn from doing the scenes?" Kurt and Paul responded saying that the process enhances understanding the dynamics of what students go through. Edward stated "I don't have command of the acting technology" and expressed appreciation for learning more about "the corresponding grids of literature and theatre practice." Bob mentioned that his students seem to be very concerned about "the orientation of bodies" and that he learned something about that by looking at the process from inside out. Tom said that as someone who had no real stage experience he learned how important it is for an actor to enjoy performance and how that enjoyment transfers to an audience. Clare reported that she had incorporated scene work in her Shakespeare class this semester for the first time and that it produced "wonderful" results and insightful interpretations. Cezarija noted "Performing helps you read better." Dan reflected upon the heuristic value of performance exercise and how the collaborative nature of the work helps foster a community within a classroom and a "sense of safety" where ideas can be ventured more fearlessly. Bob commented that because most of his students come from rural communities, he finds that performance exercises are "palpably liberating, especially for the young women." Caroline listed three points of discovery derived from performance exercise experience: 1) A new way of looking at text: "page and stage come together in the language" 2) What questions to ask students when they are working on scenes and 3) The traditional "academic world can be sterile" but live performance exploration "brings human feeling back into the humanities." Miranda was struck in performing Viola's lines -- not just reading or reciting them as literature -- with how stirring the power of affective expression was to her. Eric, thinking also of how empowering it can be to deeply grasp the expressivity of words, recalled a student who had trouble at first speaking a strange word like "beauteous" while reciting a sonnet only to be overheard later eloquently incorporating "beauteous" in conversation. Bill mused that he sometimes gets the impression that the "English Literature Department has become the 'Criticism Department' . . . Examining expression through performance "brings life back to literature." He added that he has "gained new confidence in how to make performance work in the classroom." Kurt offered reciprocal views of how theatre students can learn to appreciate textual cruxes through heuristic exercises. Tom pointed out the plays present "some very practical problems to be solved, choices to be made" and that those challenges relate to important essential skills students need to develop. Ellen "relished the opportunity to work through a scene that she has thought a lot about. There are moments in the scene that are technically demanding and complex. Critics blip over inconvenient lines but an actor cannot." Dan added that he now feels an "enhanced ability to talk with colleagues in the Theatre Dept." and hopes his expanded frame of reference will encourage them "to listen better." Julia reminded us of how important it is to "remember what it is like to ask students to be vulnerable, experience the puzzle of an actor's choice-making. Reading from a desk is different from acting." Ed said that he had been incorporating many exercises we had done into classes taught during the past year. He and his students found them enriching to do plus enjoyable and enlightening to observe. The hour groaned for us to exeunt. But inasmuch as "every exit is an entrance somewhere else" we withdrew knowing we would regather for the farewell soir=E9e and feeling that beyond the party and departings we would reconvene somewhere, someday. Even at the close of play, there remained a shared sense that revels were not ended. Deeply grateful for the privilege of having been part of a magnificent and stimulating collective experience, we concluded our Folger Institute with a celebratory sense of the joy and dignity of learning that we could carry onward.