Portland Stage
Saturday, May 4 | 1PM-4PM
Grades 9-12 | $50
Join Education Director, Hannah Cordes, for a hands-on look at how to use theater tools and techniques to address difficult topics, encourage dialogue, engage communities, and create socially-driven pieces of theater.
Need-based Scholarships Available
Portland Stage
Portland Stage received a Maine Arts Commission Arts Learning Grant for the 2017-18 school year. Recently I had the pleasure of visiting Lincoln Middle School in Portland where teaching artists from Portland Stage were on site working with grade 8 students. When I walked in I remembered instantly of how much I love teaching middle school. I’m so fortunate to have had this opportunity to see Portland Stage and middle schoolers ‘in action’.
Students shouted out at one another in their best Shakespeare voices: “I do not like your faults.” They attempted to beat their partner with words, to manipulate and convince them. The only rules in one of the word games: 1) be safe 2) gotta win as they learned about understanding Shakespeare. I was impressed with the engagement of the students and wowed by the teaching artists techniques. What a great way to learn about persuasive language.
Portland Stage Teaching Artists: Khalil LeSaldo, Hannah Cordes, Chris Holt, Ella Mock
Portland Stage provides excellent and age appropriate learning opportunities for these young adolescents. Thanks for your good work Hannah Cordes, Portland Stage Education Manager and the other teaching artists working at the school (and in the theatre): Chris Holt, Ella Mock, Khalil LeSaldo, and Megan Tripaldi.
The following information was provided by Hannah Cordes.
Describe the work you’ve been doing with Lincoln Middle School students.
Every year, we bring the Directors Lab Shakespeare School Tour program to the 7thand 8th grade students at Lincoln Middle School. Students watch a shortened adaptation of a Shakespeare play performed by professional actors and then are invited to explore the story and language of the play themselves in interactive workshops in their classrooms. In these workshops, students practice effective communication, creative collaboration, rhetoric, and critical analysis. Directors Lab puts Shakespeare’s language into the hands and mouths of the students, empowering them to be the artists, directors, and ensemble with the power to interpret the text and produce meaning. We also work with the 6th grade students at Lincoln Middle school through our winter show. This year, 6th grade students came to Portland Stage to see our mainstage production of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, adapted by Joe Landry. Prior to the performance, we did pre-show workshops in their classrooms with a focus on the play’s story arc and character development, particularly exploring the theme of how an individual can impact an entire community. We find that these workshops enhance student ownership over the language and story of the play. Additionally, many Lincoln students also participate in our In-Theater programming, through camps, after school classes, and other programming.
What language do you hope impacts these students and what language do you want them to walk away with?
Chris Holt, teaching artist
I hope that our work helps students realize how brilliant they are at understanding and bringing Shakespearean language (and any complicated or dense language, for that matter) alive. The workshops are designed to empower students to feel a connection to the language by using their bodies, voices, and ideas to explore the text.
In terms of specific language, I would love for each student to come away knowing at least one line of text from Julius Caesar. In her feedback, Language Arts teacher Antona Bailey remarked that students were quoting the lines from the play that we used in contrapuntal arguments on the bus! So I would call that a success!
What do you want the learners to remember in the near and/or far future?
The goal of our programming is to enhance literacy and to empower students to be brave with their creativity, so that is always my number one hope of any given program. More simply than that, I hope that Portland Public School students look back on their Portland Stage experiences from K-12th grade and feel connected to art in a meaningful way. I hope that our programming inspires them to seek out theatre and other art forms, as both audience members and artists themselves. I hope that the access to art provided by Portland Stage programming will help shape future generations into people who appreciate and value artistic expression as a means of understanding and investigating the world.
What are the greatest benefits of the work with Lincoln Middle School students/staff?
Hannah Cordes
What I love most about our work with Lincoln Middle School students/staff is that we are able to continue to build relationships and build upon the work that we do both with teachers and students. We interact with students all three years of their Middle School experience, with the intent to build upon the work we have done the previous year. In 6thgrade, we focus on the elements of storytelling (characters, theme, plot, etc.) and how to bring that alive using your voice, body, and imagination. In 7th grade, we engage students with Shakespeare (often their first experience of Shakespeare’s work) through the lens of creative collaboration, exploring how to tell stories as an ensemble. Then in 8th grade, we explore Shakespeare again, this time with a focus on rhetoric and critical analysis, investigating how to make an argument, how theatre engages with its audience, and how the audience/actor interpretation impacts the content of a play. With teachers, I am grateful for the relationships we have created with Lincoln teachers. This allows us to find more and more ways in which Portland Stage can continue to support classroom teachers and how we can make our work even more impactful to teachers and students alike.
STUDENT FEEDBACK
TEACHER FEEDBACK
NOTE: In the fall I posted a series of blog posts on Portland Stage. You can access the series by typing in Portland Stage in the “search archives” box located on the right side of the blog.
Teacher Professional Development Workshops
Jim Palmarini
Advocating for Advocacy: Strategies for Achieving Positive Change
Presenter: Jim Palmarini, Educational Theatre Association
Join EdTA Director of Educational Policy James Palmarini for a discussion about the state and local policies, issues, and legislation that impact theatre education in New England and how you can build relationships with the key stakeholders and organizations that can help you effect positive change. We’ll move into a roundtable dialogue in which attendees can share their specific advocacy challenges and successes and wrap up with a “next steps for change” brainstorming exercise.
Rick Osann
Writing Meaningful Standards for Performance
Presenter: Rick Osann, Bonny Eagle High School
Having trouble writing meaningful standards that really get to the heart of what you want your students to learn? We’ll review the language in a variety of standards, performance indicators and rubrics (tasks), then observe a student performance and try to write our own language to identify what we wanted the student to learn. We’ll also try to find clear language to identify what differentiates “Meets” (3) from “Partially Meets” (the dreaded 2 or 2.5). We hope you will come out of this with some practical assessments you can use in your classroom.
Hannah Cordes
The Play’s The Thing: Acting Shakespeare
Presenter: Hannah Cordes, Portland Stage
The focus of this workshop will be activating Shakespeare’s language through play and on-your-feet activities. We will explore the use of language, status, group play, rhetoric, physical storytelling, and more!
Ovations Offstage: Tableaus of Courage: How to Help Students Engage with Complex Content through Theater
Presenter: Catherine Anderson, Portland Ovations
Catherine Anderson
Ovations Offstage Director Catherine Anderson will introduce workshop participants to Ovations Dynamic School-Time Performance Series for 2018-19, and model for teachers how to help students engage with any story, or content (fictional or not) through the use of the “tableau”. Tableau is a wordless theater activity for small groups of students that can be adapted for any age group. Participants will leave with a lesson plan with clear learning targets, and assessment criteria. Most recently Catherine presented this workshop to over three hundred eight graders at Scarborough Middle School to help students integrate and grapple with concepts of discrimination and segregation as part of their unit on Japanese Internment Camps.
The Education Team and What We Value
Portland Stage, located in Portland, Maine, offers vital theater arts education to learners ages 4-18 through our In-Theater and In-School programming. All classes and workshops are taught by professionally trained Teaching Artists and focus on literacy, cultural awareness, collaborative play, and creative thinking. Our teaching philosophy highlights process over product, deepening students’ ability to analyze, synthesize, and think critically while making connections to the thoughts and ideas behind the written word. This is one of a series of 6 blog posts outlining who we are and what we do, brought to you by Hannah Cordes, Education Manager, and Julianne Shea, Education Administrator. These posts will appear September 27 through November 1, 2017, on Wednesday’s.
Education Artist in a workshop Photo by Aaron Flacke
As Portland Stage’s education program has grown over the years, so has our educational aesthetic. Thanks to the continuous work over the years by a delightful, curious, joyful, caring, and silly team of educators and administrators, our program has developed into what it is today.
All of our classes are process-based. The work is focused more on having an experience with theater rather than on the final product. Our text work is focused on bringing the text alive. We make time for scavenger hunts and theater games because we believe that these activities build theatrical skills as well as encourage collaboration, creative play, and communication.
Students drive the work that happens in the classroom. We honor and celebrate the ideas they bring to the table. For example, we talk to them about what characters and stories excite them. At the end of a class we ask them what they would like to share in their open studio. In our PLAY in Schools program, we ask students to come up with a simple movement to bring particular words in a poem to life and those become the actions we use to tell the story. In our Directors Lab program, we invite students to take ownership of Shakespeare’s language. We are always searching for ways to increase student investment and creative ownership.
Whenever possible, we work with a co-teaching model. This allows for us to have multiple people in the room cheering for each student and championing their experience! When we co-teach, we increase the likelihood that students will find a way to connect with a teacher and find an entry point into the work. As teachers, we work together and model the collaboration and problem-solving that we ask young people to participate in.
Hannah Cordes in a workshop Photo by Aaron Flacke
We consistently celebrate each other’s work! We devalue competition and focus on fostering ensemble. We invite greater and greater levels of participation in students’ work. We celebrate each seemingly small but monumental acts of bravery that are present in each classroom we enter.
The people you are most likely to see at a Portland Stage workshop are Hannah Cordes, Julianne Shea, and our two education interns. We love reading picture books, playing theater games, exploring texts, and working with young people. We are also lucky enough to have a whole team of over 35 education artists. These education artists have trained at theater companies across the nation, many have B.A.’s or B.F.A.’s in theater, others have Masters Degrees, and others teach at academic institutions. All of the people you find working in Portland Stage’s programs are practicing artists. The work they create both through Portland Stage and with other companies in Maine’s rich artistic community informs their work in the classroom. They personally know the thrill of creating art and the vulnerability it calls for. This practice allows them to excitedly create a supportive environment for students to learn about theater themselves. They understand the risks they are asking students to take because they often take risks in their own creative projects. We also make time to continue to learn new things about theater and about teaching. Notably, Portland Stage’s education team gets together one weekend every year to engage in training. For the last three years we have had Kevin Coleman, the Director of Education at Shakespeare & Company, lead our educators in a teacher training intensive. It is important for all of us to learn new skills and reinforce concepts we value. We also cherish the fact that this training allows for us all to be in the same room at the same time asking questions, getting curious about teaching practice, and sharing stories (both successes and failures).
As our program develops and we collaborate with more and more artists, we continually gather feedback and implement that into our process. We strive to learn and grow. We are grateful for the opportunity to work with so many strong educators.
Interested in learning more about this program? Email education@portlandstage.org or call 207-774-1043 ext. 104.
In-Theater Program
Portland Stage, located in Portland, Maine, offers vital theater arts education to learners ages 4-18 through our In-Theater and In-School programming. All classes and workshops are taught by professionally trained Teaching Artists and focus on literacy, cultural awareness, collaborative play, and creative thinking. Our teaching philosophy highlights process over product, deepening students’ ability to analyze, synthesize, and think critically while making connections to the thoughts and ideas behind the written word. This is one of a series of 6 blog posts outlining who we are and what we do, brought to you by Hannah Cordes, Education Manager, and Julianne Shea, Education Administrator. These posts will appear September 27 through November 1, 2017, on Wednesday’s.
Photo by Aaron Flacke
Our In-Theater programming is particularly close to my heart because of the students who come back year after year and class after class, taking in every Portland Stage experience that they can find. This is my third season at Portland Stage and even in that small amount of time, I have been able to see the students grow as actors, collaborators, and creators. We offer classes and intensives for middle and high school students, vacation and summer camps for all ages, and dramatic readings and workshops of children’s books for ages 4-10.
At Portland Stage, we take After School to a whole new level. We devise haunting pieces for our All Hallows Eve Conservatory in the fall and tackle the humor and drama of Shakespeare in the spring. Our students are delightfully outspoken, endlessly creative, and admirably dedicated. What I enjoy most about working with these young people, however, is how much they make me laugh. Their quirky uniqueness never fails to create an eventful class each week. For example, when we brainstormed our company name in last season’s All Hallows Eve Conservatory, some of the suggestions they came up with included: “The Tell-Tale Kidneys”, “Trainwreck”, “The HallowTWEEN Company”, “The Ghosts of the Purple Floor” (our Theater for Kids space has a bright purple floor), and, the name they ended up selecting, “The Democratic Grim Society of Hauntedness”. On day one of our spring Shakespeare Conservatory last season, we asked the students what they loved most about Shakespeare and storytelling. Of course, their first answer was “the intensity and the mass death scenes”. Armed with that information, we created a Shakespeare mash-up of the utmost intensity that ended in a mass death scene where each student dramatically died not once, but TWICE.
Photo by Aaron Flacke
This past summer, we ran 13 summer camps and welcomed nearly 200 students into our building. All of our camps are based on a book or play, so we got to play with spectacular stories such as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Macbeth, and Ramona Quimby. Each student picks which characters they want to explore and then are given a scene and a speech to work on throughout the week. The students become an ensemble of actors who work together to tell stories, solve problems, and create theater. At the end of the week, we invite family and friends into our space to share what we have been working on. The bravery these students exhibit by stepping up in front of other people to share their work and the pride they have in each other creates for a beautiful end to many fantastic weeks of camp.
Our Play Me a Story program (PMAS) is a dramatic reading series that takes place on Saturday mornings. Professional actors perform picture books and poems for an audience of 4-10 year-olds. After the reading, teaching artists lead the students in an active workshop where the students become the actors. They explore their actor’s tools (voice, body, and imagination) through games, activities, and performance. This program is an absolute blast for our actors and teachers, as well as the kids! One element of our job in the education office is reading tons of picture books in order to select books for both PMAS and our PLAY In Schools program. Julianne and I are what you might call picture book aficionados. Any time someone in the office needs a smile or a pick-me-up, we will get out one of our favorite picture books and do an impromptu reading. In fact, on the new education interns’ first day, we all read one of our favorites (Drew Daywalt’s Legend of The Legend of Rock, Paper, Scissors, highly recommended!) in a circle and it was absolutely magical. Moral of the story is: we love this program and picture books and all of the joy they bring to both adults and children.
At Portland Stage, I have met a wide array of students who teach me more than I could ever teach them. They teach me to be brave with my creativity, fearless in the face of any challenge or prompt. They teach me to be kind and supportive of one another, reinforcing each other’s successes and courageous attempts. They make me laugh uncontrollably and cry unapologetically. Most importantly, they remind me of the importance of theater education and the agency, confidence, and independence that it can give to young people.
Interested in learning more about this program? Email education@portlandstage.org or call 207-774-1043 ext. 104
Student Matinees
Portland Stage, located in Portland, Maine, offers vital theater arts education to learners ages 4-18 through our In-Theater and In-School programming. All classes and workshops are taught by professionally trained Teaching Artists and focus on literacy, cultural awareness, collaborative play, and creative thinking. Our teaching philosophy highlights process over product, deepening students’ ability to analyze, synthesize, and think critically while making connections to the thoughts and ideas behind the written word. This is one of a series of 6 blog posts outlining who we are and what we do, brought to you by Hannah Cordes, Education Manager, and Julianne Shea, Education Administrator. These posts will appear September 27 through November 1, 2017, on Wednesday’s.
Portland Stage’s Student Matinee Program annually offers students the chance to see our Mainstage productions at a discounted ticket rate during the school day. Prior to the performance, students and teachers receive our educational resource guide, PlayNotes. Created by the Portland Stage Literary and Education departments, these extensive guides present a broad spectrum of information and perspectives on each play in our Mainstage season. These guides are designed to support and further audiences’ experience of each play.
On the day of the performance, students and teachers take over our mainstage theater! For many students that attend these productions, it is their first time in a professional theater. As Jenna Quimby, a fifth grade teacher at Hall Elementary School, said: “So many of our students at Hall do not have the means or opportunity to attend a play. I think that it is so culturally important for students to experience theater.” Pat Fox, the drama teacher at Fryeburg Academy, brings her students to see every show in the season every year. This means that by the end of a student’s senior year, they will have seen 28 productions at Portland Stage! It is a privilege to watch the ownership these students have of the space and listen to them compare the shows in the season.
Following the performance, students participate in a talkback discussion with the cast and crew, which helps them gain a deeper awareness of the creative process in a professional context and encourages them to think critically about the themes and messages of the play. These discussions are often insightful, funny, and delightful. One of my favorite memories from a talkback was the engaging conversation after our production of The Mountaintop by Katori Hall. This play is a theatrical re-imagining of events the night before the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Students and teachers alike were deeply moved by this story. Even after the talkback had ended, and students were leaving the theater, a group of students stayed to continue the conversation with the inspiring actors in this production. They didn’t leave the theater until they had to because the bus was about to drive away!
Another memorable student matinee moment came at the end of our production of Buyer and Cellar by Jonathan Tolins. This play is a one man show about Alex, a struggling actor, who takes the bizarre job of working in a shopping mall that Barbra Streisand has built in the basement of her Malibu home. As students were leaving, one young person stayed behind in order to talk to myself and Hannah Cordes, our education manager. He let us know that he had been skeptical about whether he would like this one person show or not. He had thought this format might be boring, but was instead inspired by the actor’s performance and in awe of his nuance, humor, bravery, and specificity. He told us that he is a basketball player, but that he was interested in delving into more acting experiences in the future. It was lovely to watch this student feel so compelled to share his reaction with us.
We also offer pre- and post-show workshops with our student matinee program. We design these workshops to further deepen the students’ experience with the play. When schools request a workshop, we tailor them to the needs of the students and the content of the play. After a workshop with Deering High School students, educator Kathleen Harris noted that “The fine work of the three Portland Stage educators made the personal, educational and societal experience of attending Disgraced a deeper and more meaningful one for many students. Portland Stage provides a tremendous arts and education…they are a valuable and important asset to our efforts to educate and inspire our youth.”
James Carlise at Waynflete School reached out to us as he was planning his dramaturgy class. Before and after students came to see a production at Portland Stage, our literary manager and the assistant director & dramaturg on the show went into his classroom and talked to students about the play. One student in his class wrote, “Meeting and hearing two actual dramaturgs explain their work and the impact it had on the other members of a production brought a sort of concreteness and tangibility to a role we have studied primarily on paper, and seeing the bar lifted to such a height by professionals has inspired me to look at theater work with a more critical and creatively educated eye, weighing all options and taking the time to look at everything from several angles.”
We are grateful to be a part of exposing young people in Maine to the arts through this program that offers students the chance to see a professional production with their peers.
Please watch the video below to learn hear more about the program!
Interested in learning more? Email education@portlandstage.org or call 207-774-1043 ext. 104
PLAY
Portland Stage, located in Portland, Maine, offers vital theater arts education to learners ages 4-18 through our In-Theater and In-School programming. All classes and workshops are taught by professionally trained Teaching Artists and focus on literacy, cultural awareness, collaborative play, and creative thinking. Our teaching philosophy highlights process over product, deepening students’ ability to analyze, synthesize, and think critically while making connections to the thoughts and ideas behind the written word. This is one of a series of 6 blog posts outlining who we are and what we do, brought to you by Hannah Cordes, Education Manager, and Julianne Shea, Education Administrator. These posts will appear September 27 through November 1, 2017, on Wednesday’s.
Education Artists Bess Welden and Julia Fitzgerald at a Play in Schools dramatic reading Photo by Aaron Flacke
Portland Stage’s PLAY in Schools program brings children’s books to life through a school-wide dramatic reading, followed by interactive classroom workshops. The goal of PLAY is to connect theater with literacy by making literature performative and encouraging character recall, understanding of themes, emotional recognition, physical storytelling, and vocal characterization. We actively engage students in small groups/workshops using their bodies, voices, and imaginations to build understanding of the text while bringing the stories and characters to life.
Each school-wide dramatic reading includes three picture books and two poems centered on a theme. These themes range from Choosing Kindness to Made in Maine. It is exciting to explore books that young people know well and to introduce them to new stories. During the 2016-2017 season, we included Chris Van Dusen’s The Circus Ship. Each time we announced the title of this book at the all-school assemblies, the room would erupt in cheers. Beverly Coursey, the principal at Ocean Avenue Elementary School, said it was like when Billy Joel announces that he will be performing “Piano Man”! There is nothing quite like listening to a room full of elementary school students laugh at a particularly funny story or moment! It is a privilege to witness this reaction to so many engaging stories. We ask each audience to pay attention to the three actor tools (Portland Stage defines these three tools as body, voice, and imagination) that will be used during the reading. That way when the students enter the workshop, they are prepared and empowered to explore their own actor tools to bring the story alive in their own way.
We then give students the chance to dive further into these works during workshops with our professional teaching artists. We are delighted by students’ thoughts and creations as they explore their actor tools through the texts and characters. On our third and final visit of the year to one classroom, the students were invited to write their own versions of Holly Meade’s If I Never Forever Endeavor. After a year of exploring their actor tools with Portland Stage Teaching Artists, the students wrote this poem:
“If I never endeavor to perform, I won’t get to try and be brave.
If I did endeavor to perform, I could play with my voice, my body, and my imagination!”
Nathan Pike from Ocean Avenue Elementary stated that his students’ “creativity, physical movement, and imagination” when engaging with stories “has dramatically improved since participation in the PLAY workshops. Portland Stage has become a vital component to the culture and learning of our students.”
Education Manager Hannah Cordes in a Play in Schools Workshop Photo by Aaron Flacke
Theatrically exploring text can help students find a new way in to reading. Alec Lapidus, PhD, and Heba Ahmed from the Literacy, Language, and Culture Program at University of Southern Maine produced a report on the PLAY program titled Multiliteracies in Maine: The Play Me a Story Program. They state that “PLAY caters to a wide array of learning styles and linguistic backgrounds, offering a variety of ways to interact with content, explore new ideas and concepts, and create meaningful output…As the learners use their body, voice, and imagination to observe, analyze, interpret, and express thoughts on the world around them, they become able to go beyond passively absorbing information provided to them…This multiliteracy approach is clearly indicative of the program’s awareness of the changing linguistic and sociocultural landscape not only in Maine, but also in the United States in general.” It is powerful to create a space were students can get excited about text in a new way. We hear feedback from teachers that reinforces the idea that for many students PLAY has opened a door for them. A 4th grade teacher shared with us, “This student struggles to remember letters, sight words, and other information. With the PLAY program, he could remember EVERY word and act out the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I know now how to teach letters, sound, math, sight vocabulary, etc. To this student!”
We are continually grateful to be able to bring theater to elementary school students through this program. Witnessing students get excited about literature, see professional actors fearlessly use their bodies, voices, and imaginations, and explore their own actor tools during the workshop is a joyful experience.
Interested in learning more about this program? Email education@portlandstage.org or call 207-774-1043 ext. 104
Directors Lab
Portland Stage, located in Portland, Maine, offers vital theater arts education to learners ages 4-18 through our In-Theater and In-School programming. All classes and workshops are taught by professionally trained Teaching Artists and focus on literacy, cultural awareness, collaborative play, and creative thinking. Our teaching philosophy highlights process over product, deepening students’ ability to analyze, synthesize, and think critically while making connections to the thoughts and ideas behind the written word. This is one of a series of 6 blog posts outlining who we are and what we do, brought to you by Hannah Cordes, Education Manager, and Julianne Shea, Education Administrator. These posts will appear September 27 through November 1, 2017, on Wednesday’s.
Performance of Macbeth with Education Artists Megan Tripaldi, Hannah Daly, Erica Murphy, & Christopher Holt Photo by Aaron Flacke
One of our exciting In-School programs is called Directors Lab. Directors Lab engages middle and high school students with Shakespeare through performance, workshops, and active text-work. This year, we will be performing a 45 minute version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar followed by a talkback with the actors and exciting hands-on workshops in classrooms. Directors Lab puts Shakespeare’s language into the hands and mouths of the students, empowering them to be the artists, directors, and ensemble with the power to interpret the text and produce meaning.
On a personal note, this is my absolute favorite program to teach and engage with. As the director of the touring production, I get the privilege to be in the room with our fantastic actors as we explore the text and characters of Shakespeare’s plays. We put on the production with only four actors, so a large part of the rehearsal process is problem-solving, brainstorming, and playful experimentation. How do we show which character you are playing in any given moment? How do we fill in the gaps that a 45-minute adaptation poses us with? How do we bring this story alive in an engaging way? Rehearsal is an action-packed week of collaboration, laughter, tears, and joy that makes bringing it to schools all the more exciting and valuable.
The final and most important part of the equation is the students! It is remarkable to watch students bring Shakespeare’s language alive using their own experiences and emotions as the backdrop for approaching the text. I rediscover Shakespeare’s plays each time I step into a classroom, as the students introduce new ideas and layers to these stories.
Students make for the best audiences because they have less social restrictions as spectators. They organically respond to what is occurring on stage, which makes for a transformative 45 minutes. During a performance of Romeo and Juliet, the woman playing Juliet asked the nurse “Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?” and the crowd of students erupted with an “OHHHHH!”. The students’ response was because they knew that this was a huge moment for Juliet’s character and an important reveal. Clearly, they were following the story and invested in the characters’ journeys. The energy in the cafeteria, gym, theater, or wherever else we perform is electric and like nothing else I have ever experienced.
Directors Lab Workshop Photo by Aaron Flacke
One of the first activities that we do in the workshops is called “text layups” (an activity created by the education team at Shakespeare & Company) where each student performs a single line of text. Another student stands behind the performer and reads the line from a piece of paper. That way, the actor is not reading and trying to comprehend or “get it right”. Their job is simply to listen to the line, repeat it, and bring the text alive, whether through an emotion, a gesture, a tone of voice, or a combination of all of the above. At a school visit last season, one student got up and completely froze. He had wanted to try to say the line out loud but once he was faced with the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to speak. I went up to him and asked him to say the line just to me so that he would have an experience of speaking the words without worrying about an “audience”. He looked me right in the eye and spoke the line of text with emotional clarity and power and I was incredibly moved by his performance. He continued to participate throughout the workshop, playing a witch in our exploration of the “double, double” text and making brave acting choices throughout. At the end of each workshop, every student reinforces one thing from the workshop and many students reinforced the boy for his bravery. He was beaming by the time he left the room. After all the students were gone, the teacher came up to me and told me that student not only never speaks in class, but he also had never made eye contact with a fellow classmate or a teacher before. This is just one of many moments we have experienced in this program that sheds some light on the extraordinary power of theater and Shakespeare.
I could talk about this program for pages, so instead I will end with some quotes from teachers that I believe sum up the magic of this work.
“The workshop brought out the chance for some kids to really shine. Those students who struggle sitting in a chair all day had the most fun, I think. The activities moved along at a good pace and were valuable to the students, giving many a chance to take risks, not something middle school students do. Now a couple want to be actors!” – Jane Lombard, 8th grade teacher at Lincoln Middle School
“Thank you for coming to King and creating a wonderful play for the seventh graders of our school to see. The experience was very fun and helped us learn more about Shakespeare, without making it too complicated to understand. I admire that you were able to do multiple characters in just one play, it must have been very difficult to do.” – Student at King Middle School
“The students loved the post-performance workshops. They were a wonderful way to capitalize on the performance and appreciate Shakespeare’s craft in fun new ways…In short, [the students] got thoroughly engaged and involved in your wonderful post-performance program. I am already working on obtaining the necessary funding to have you back next year–no matter what play it is. That’s how highly all the 11th grade teachers thought of your efforts.” – Rich Westley, English teacher at Scarborough High School.
Interested in learning more about this program? Email education@portlandstage.org or call 207-774-1043 ext. 104.
Introducing
Portland Stage, located in Portland, Maine, offers vital theater arts education to learners ages 4-18 through our In-Theater and In-School programming. All classes and workshops are taught by professionally trained Teaching Artists and focus on literacy, cultural awareness, collaborative play, and creative thinking. Our teaching philosophy highlights process over product, deepening students’ ability to analyze, synthesize, and think critically while making connections to the thoughts and ideas behind the written word. This is one of a series of 6 blog posts outlining who we are and what we do, brought to you by Hannah Cordes, Education Manager, and Julianne Shea, Education Administrator. These posts will appear September 27 through November 1, 2017, on Wednesday’s.
Hannah Cordes Education Manager & Julianne Shea Education Administrator Photo by Aaron Flacke
Portland Stage Education is a literacy-based program dedicated to empowering imaginative storytelling, playful collaboration, effective communication, and boundless creativity. From In-Theater to In-School programming, our work is always student-driven and geared towards inspiring students to bring literature and characters alive in new and exciting ways. We offer programming for ages 4-18 throughout the state of Maine.
Education has always been a part of Portland Stage’s mission, but 2010 marks an important moment in our program’s history. Susie Konkel had the vision to create a space and program for young people in Maine to connect them to Portland Stage and, thanks to her generous support, we were able to realize that vision. In 2010, we opened our Theater for Kids space and expanded our education programming to further serve Maine youth through theatrical training, exploration, and creation. Then, in 2012, an anonymous donor established Culture Club-Portland, a consortium with the goal of providing free arts experiences to every child in Portland Public Schools each academic year. Culture Club-Portland includes Portland Stage, the Portland Museum of Art, Portland Ovations, and the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Out of this innovative program, Portland Stage’s In-School programming was born. We now proudly work with all of the Portland Public Schools and continue to expand our In School programming throughout the state of Maine.
Our In-Theater programs include the Play Me a Story dramatic reading series for ages 4-10, Vacation and Summer Camps, After School Classes, and Training Intensives and Workshops. This year, we are thrilled to be establishing a Shakespeare Teen Company that will put on a production of Macbeth this spring.
Our In-School programs include the PLAY program for elementary school students, Directors Lab touring Shakespeare productions, Student Matinees of our mainstage season, and workshops with students and teachers in their classrooms. Cynthia Loring, Principal at Presumpscot Elementary in Portland, shared that “We have seen the impact of this program in our students. Teachers report that they see a new confidence in students and they are ‘more willing to take chances to perform in front of a group. It’s more natural to them.’ The skills our students learn from these visiting artists translate to the work they do in their classrooms. One teacher noted, ‘I have seen a difference in my student’s fluency and inflection when reading aloud–’”. We are extremely grateful to the teachers and administrators who have partnered with us in the past and look forward to continuing to build relationships with more schools as our program continues to grow.
Interested in learning more about this program? Email education@portlandstage.org or call 207-774-1043 ext. 104 .
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