Playshops & Teacher Training 2024-2025
“Our drums are bringing forth our youth.”– Coriolanus
Tennessee Shakespeare Company dynamic Teaching-Artists move William Shakespeare’s stories and language off the page and into the hearts of your students. We believe the passion and specificity of Shakespeare’s text is essential for young people to experience. Shakespeare was (and is) meant to be PLAYED, therefore we will invite your students out of their chairs and into the world of these plays in fun, interactive playshops that we hope will inspire your students to form a life-long love of language. We welcome all levels of participation, and can gear our teaching curriculum to all ages and abilities. For more information and booking, please contact Sarah Hankins at (901) 759-0620; sarahhankins@tnshakespeare.org.
- One Playshop for up to 20 students: $125
- One Stage Combat Playshop for up to 20 students: $150
- One Playshop for 21-30 students: $175
Want to craft your own package? Discounts will be applied for multiple bookings.
Contact Sarah Hankins at (901) 759-0620; sarahhankins@tnshakespeare.org.
Introduction Playshops:
“On With My Speech”
Explore Wild and Whirling Words
Shakespeare is much more poetry, passion, and wit than he is tights, kissing, and funny accents. This fun and revealing playshop will excite your students about Shakespeare’s language, his relationships, the secrets in his text, and his writer’s voice.
“The Play’s the Thing”
You Pick the Play, We Help you Unpack It!
Pick your play! Our teaching artists will interactively ready your students for classroom study of your chosen play! Students meet the characters, recognize key relationships, and absorb the essential back-stories leading to immediate accessibility of your play. Students will know what to watch for as the story unfolds and, best of all, gain ownership of the language as they speak Shakespeare’s riveting text. This playshop is the sure-fire way to excite your students about the Shakespeare play of your choice!
Specialty Playshops:
“Give Signal to the Fight!”
Stage Violence in Shakespeare
Join our stage combat club and learn the basics to create the illusion of shoves, slaps, punches, falls, and kicks. Students will move their bodies and see how much focus and control goes into making a fight onstage look real. They will learn about how safety and clear storytelling are the basis of stage combat. Through fostering good communication and partnership skills, students will craft a small unarmed combination that allows them to connect their breath, body and voice to some of Shakespeare’s characters.
“Holla, You Clown!”
Get Crazy Funny with Shakespeare
Students explore playfulness, physicality, clowning, and how it manifests in Shakespeare’s comedies. In a series of wild and wacky exercises, we will bring life to the text of some of Shakespeare’s funniest people.
“Fie, Painted Rhetoric!”
Speech and the Art of Persuasion in Shakespeare
Rhetoric is everywhere. It is in our political forums, our media, and our everyday life. There is an art to persuasion, and few were better at it than William Shakespeare. Students will explore how he taught us passionate means to win our arguments, sell our points of view, and confidently speak to the public.
“Thy Poet Doth Invent!”
Speak Your Poetry Out Loud
Combine your students’ poetic voices with creative movement. We invite your students to write freely, harness the inner critic, and fall in love with literary devices.
Teacher Training:
Bring Shakespeare off the page and into the hearts of your students!
Our Teacher Training Workshops focus on performance-based methods of teaching Shakespeare and can be catered to any Shakespeare play you may be teaching. The Workshop offers applicable tips on how to activate Shakespeare’s text for students from professional classical actors. Through interactive games, hands-on activities, and scene studies, we prepare our Educators to teach Shakespeare through active and creative approaches in the classroom that fuse scholarship with performance.
What students and teachers say:
“The play shop definitely gave me a new found love for Shakespeare. This was the most energetic, yet educational workshop I’ve ever been to, and I would recommend this to everyone.”
– Hope Brown, Student, Blue Mountain College
“Incredible! I wasn’t sure my students would want to participate, but they absolutely loved it. They could not stop talking about it!”
– Kim Tucker, Germantown High School
“There’s no way I could have been as effective as you were in introducing Shakespeare.”
– Karissa Steward, Riverdale Elementary School, Memphis Tennessee
To view TSC’s page on the Tennessee Arts Commission website for Ticket Subsidy and State Funding, click here. To view available grants, click here.