Playshops & Teacher Training 2026-2027

“Our drums are bringing forth our youth.”– Coriolanus

Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s Playshops celebrate language, creativity, and curiosity with engaging workshops focused on theater and Shakespeare. Shakespeare was (and is) meant to be performed rather than read. In our Playshops, we will invite your students out of their chairs and into the world of Shakespeare in fun, interactive playshops. 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) 759-0604; sarahhankins@tnshakespeare.org.

• One Playshop for up to 20 students: $150
• One Playshop for 21-30 students: $175
• One Stage Combat Playshop for up to 20 students: $200
• Please contact us for student groups larger than 30 (or 20 for Stage Combat).

Want to craft your own package? Discounts will be applied for multiple bookings.
Contact Sarah Hankins at (901) 759-0604; sarahhankins@tnshakespeare.org.

Introduction Playshops:

“On With My Speech”

Your students may think that Shakespeare is nothing but actors in tights, lovey-dovey scenes, and funny accents. As teachers know, Shakespeare is filled with poetry, passion, wit, and much more. This fun playshop will excite your students about Shakespeare’s text by getting them on their feet to physically explore iambic pentameter, metaphor, rhetorical arguments, and other elements of heightened language. We encourage students to use imagination, emotion, and creative freedom to bring Shakespeare’s words to life!

“The Play’s the Thing”
You Pick the Play, We Help you Unpack It!

Our Teaching-Artists will get your students on their feet and ready for a deep dive into your chosen play! Students meet the characters, examine key relationships, and identify major plot points, leading to greater ease in approaching the play. Through active exercises, students will also engage with Shakespeare’s poetry and become familiar with iambic pentameter as they speak Shakespeare’s text. This playshop will excite your students about the Shakespeare play of your choice!

Specialty Playshops:

“Give Signal to the Fight!”
Stage Violence in Shakespeare

Step into the world of stage combat and learn the basic steps of creating illusions of shoves, slaps, punches, and kicks. Students will see how much focus and physical control go into making a fight onstage safe and repeatable. They will then learn how to use these moves to tell a clear story and make a staged fight look realistic. Through fostering good communication and partnership skills, students will rehearse a small unarmed combination to connect them to their breath and body, and give voice to a character. This class can also be tailored to a particular theme, play, or need for your organization.

“Thy Poet Doth Invent!”
Fall in Love with Poetry

Our Teaching-Artists will use Shakespeare’s text as a launch pad for students to create their own poems, celebrating and incorporating their individual choices, experiences, and perspectives. We introduce poetic terms and ideas as a conduit for their expression, drawing from contemporary poets and spoken word artists such as Tupac Shakur, Joy Harjo, Nikki Giovanni, Dasan Ahanu. We invite your students to write freely, acknowledge and mitigate the self-critic, speak their words aloud, and fall in love with self-expression.

Want a deeper dive or looking for a specialty topic?

Our Teaching-Artists bring a wealth of experience to your classroom and can deliver Playshops on clown technique, rhetoric, directing, creative writing, and acting coaching for students from K-65+. Don’t see your topic listed here? Contact us! We are excited about the opportunity to work with you to craft the ideal class for your needs.

Teacher Training:

Gather together a group of your colleagues to sharpen your skills before launching your Shakespeare unit! 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. Through interactive exercises, 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