July 16th: Teaching Workshop with Utah Shakespeare Festival

​Danielle Gurnea
English/Theatre Department
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM

While attending the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, we were provided an opportunity to meet with Southern Utah University’s Theatre Education expert Michael Bahr. This workshop was SO enjoyable and many of my colleagues commented on how these strategies will be used in our classes. 
 
Michael encouraged us to engage students with Shakespeare through theatre. We began by singing…yes, a group sing-along, which sold me. Paul presented us with poster boards of Mya Lixian Gosling’s lyrics for King Lear, sung to the tune of “Santa Claus is coming to town.” I appreciated this introduction to Gosling’s work, as they transform well-known song tunes to address Shakesperean themes found at  Good Tickle Brain, I can see this being a big hit with my students! 

After a fun vocal warm-up, we then got to go on the stage to engage with Michael through dynamic exercises. As a theatre person, I have a love/hate relationship with theatre games. Self-conscious and awkward as I am, my first reaction is always “ugh, gross..why?!..,” but once comfortable, I love the dynamic created. Michael was so wonderful at establishing a level of comfort and safety right off the bat. We began with the classic energy passing game Schwing, to pass energy then updated the words with various Shakespeare phrases. Schwing became “forsooth” and ‘bong’ became “nay!” This is a great way to allow students to engage with content differently and make Shakespeare 

We then began playing around with movement based on phrases, emotions, colors, etc. The highlight was the culminating activity of mirrors using bamboo sticks where we partnered up and balanced bamboo sticks between our palms so that we had to match movements while reciting lines. Some of us said them verbatim while others took some creative liberty like changing “Pursue me not” to “get away from me” while moving around the stage. This was such a fun activity and really pushed many of us outside of our comfort zones in a safe way. It was also very entertaining and everyone got some laughs out of this. 

One of our teaching groups adapted this activity as their lesson by having us mirror movement with a partner while saying phrases related to Desdemona and girlhood. It was a great connection to movement and themes with acting and reacting to set the tone. I really enjoyed the opportunity to see the strategies we learned with Michael in action.

He really provided many Shakespeare and general theatre resources such as improv games for educators to use in their classrooms. I know these will be a big hit with my students!