ABOUT THE MASTER CLASSES:

    Using not only his thirty years of experience as a professional actor and director of Shakespeare’s plays, but also his five years of working with Chinese university students performing Shakespeare in English, Joseph Graves will divide these Master Classes into two sections, distinct in their content but deeply interwoven in their goal of helping Chinese students and their directors get Shakespeare off the page and onto the stage with understanding, clarity and excitement for audiences.

     The first section will involve the groups meeting together to explore the challenges faced by Chinese students speaking not only English as a second language, but Shakespeare as a third language. This section will look at the almost magical way in which Shakespeare uses the vowel and consonant sounds of the English language to create characters and to reveal the emotional ranges of those characters. And further how the great poet, through not only the literal meaning of the words but the “noises” the specific combinations of letters make, invokes from the vowel and consonant sounds, stage pictures and ideas which resonate and bring to life his plays in performance. This section will focus not only on the speaking of Shakespeare’s language, particularly as it relates to fundamental problems encountered by Chinese students with this beautiful but sometimes abstruse language, but also the profound and inescapable way the actor’s entire body is involved in fully articulating Shakespeare’s language.

    The second section will involve Joseph working with the individual teams on their specific scenes. As much time as is available will be spent with each group, both directors and actors, on the demands of staging their scenes to best effect, and towards the most complete articulation through action of the scene: i.e. how to move, where to move, when to move, when not to move,  how to gesture, how not to gesture, and how a director creates over all stage pictures through actors’ positioning so as to give the most complete and clear understanding of the scene. To that end this section will address and put into practice certain fundamental staging techniques and ideas common to all Western theatre, and appropriate to the staging of any play or scene, while  giving a unique emphasis with such techniques on bringing Shakespeare words to life through stage movement. Also during this section time will be spent discussing with the Master Class participants, the specific approach to costume, set, makeup, props, sound and music which might be the most appropriate for each particular scene. After each team has finished their individual session with Joseph, that team will be assigned an area to continue their work on their scenes, and such work will be reviewed by Joseph a final time before the end of the Master Classes.

       A note: These Master Classes will be fun but they will also be quite physical. You will sweat! Participants should dress appropriately: comfortable shoes, and clothing which allows free and full movement.