The In School Experience

Shakespearience is an interactive workshop for students in Grades 3 through 12. Using a variety of age appropriate lesson plans, the program is capable of examining any play in the canon that the students are exploring. It is geared to work with approximately 40-65 students for one standard, seventy-five minute period.

The workshop deciphers a few selected lines from one or two scenes of the play being studied, making the language accessible by using some basic acting exercises to demonstrate how a professional performer’s approach to analyzing classical text can unlock and demystify it. Canada’s leading artists participate in the program, including Colm Feore, Seana McKenna, Paul Gross, Fiona Reid, Kenneth Welsh, Graham Abbey, Kate Trotter, Aidan Devine and two hundred and fifty of their colleagues. The roster is honoured to have a number of veterans from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival , the Shaw Festival, Toronto’s classical Soulpepper Theatre Company as well as a half a dozen actors on the roster who are visible minorities.

The program clearly satisfies the Ontario government’s 1999 curriculum guidelines. The Course Profile distributed by the Ministry of Education, for example, states that the English curriculum is expected to

“Develop strategies to help the student understand and interpret texts effectively.”

It is hard to imagine any lesson plan meeting this goal as efficiently and effectively as this workshop. Our efforts to get students excited about the plays of William Shakespeare have been acknowledged by educators from as far away as Rutgers University where Dr. Carol Kramer, the Supervisor of Teaching Interns at the school’s Faculty of Education, wrote:

“Your project provides students of all ability levels the opportunity to achieve.”

To arrange a Shakespearience visit to your school, please click on the On Line Application, fill out the form and email or fax it back to Marvin Karon, Executive Director of the company.