Kentucky Shakespeare Festival

Louisville, Kentucky

Kentucky Shakespeare Festival enhances community life by providing accessible, professional, classical theater and quality educational outreach programs. The company's goal is inclusion, and they believe that art is for everyone—not just those who can afford to pay the cost of a ticket, tuition, or program fee. Kentucky Shakespeare Festival's 47-year-old mission is to create programs that provide opportunities to everyone, regardless of their financial or physical limitations, to view and participate in the works of William Shakespeare, and the company continues to serve the underserved of the community in Kentucky and the region. They take a four-fold approach to art and the works of Shakespeare: the work must be available and accessible to diverse communities, it must entertain, it must educate and enlighten, and it must change people's lives.

In its production of Julius Caesar, Kentucky Shakespeare Festival will explore our very human ability to make a choice and act upon it. Performed by a team of six professional actors, Julius Caesar will be presented at 20 high schools in Kentucky. Educational activities will accompany each performance and will focus on teaching tolerance and conflict resolution. This 1½-hour interactive workshop will explore the ideas of affirmation, communication, and cooperation in the students' daily lives, while helping them to discover not only how a conflict might arise but how to resolve it. Using text from Julius Caesar, students will be able to act out a conflict and discuss how the outcome might have been different if the characters were better able to communicate or cooperate. Kentucky Shakespeare Festival will also offer a three-hour professional development workshop for staff at each participating school in order to give them tools to weave conflict resolution and drama-based activities into the curriculum. Kentucky Shakespeare Festival will also continue to work with at-risk students in the Kentucky prison system through the company's Shakespeare Behind Bars program and at Audubon Youth Development Center, which has a large population of at-risk students. These students and inmates will be encouraged to discuss the text, the conflicts embedded within the text, and how the characters accept or decline responsibility for their actions.

http://www.kyshakes.org/