Shakespeare & Company

Lenox, Massachusetts

Founded in 1978, Shakespeare & Company is a classical theater company dedicated equally to excellence in performance, education, and training. With more than 120 artists, the Company produces innovative and accessible Shakespeare performances that hold language at their center, as well as developing and producing new works of political and social significance. Now entering its 30th anniversary performance season, Shakespeare & Company is the second-largest performing arts venue in the Berkshires. With an international reputation for providing original in-depth classical theater training, the company combines Linklater voice work, text analysis, Alexander movement, fight, dance, clown, and innovative techniques developed in-house to offer a unique exploration of the actor/audience relationship. Shakespeare & Company's education program, one of the largest in the Northeast, brings Shakespeare alive and into the lives of 50,000 students and teachers annually through innovative school-based and after-school programs that are aimed at students of all abilities and backgrounds. Core programming includes the extensive nine-week long Fall Festival residency program for high schools and the 12–15 week New England Tour. One of only seven arts organizations nationwide to be identified by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, GE, and McArthur Foundations as a “Champion of Change,” Shakespeare & Company's programs were recommended by Harvard University's “Project Zero” for replication across the country. In 2005, the education program received the prestigious Commonwealth Award and, in January 2007, were one of only 17 arts organizations nationwide to receive the annual “Coming Up Taller” award for their work with at-risk teens in a ceremony at the White House.

The 2008 New England tour of A Midsummer Night's Dream will reach students and teachers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York State. The New England Tour addresses the growing need for arts experiences for children in rural areas and smaller cities where economic stresses, municipal budget cutbacks, and the elimination of school and state arts programming limit opportunities for young people to develop critically needed educational and cultural perspectives. Each performance for students in grades 7–12 emphasizes Shakespeare's language and the relationship between the actors and the audience. Following the performances, the actors engage students in a talk-back discussion of the play, the characters, and their motives. In addition, the New England Tour 's cast of professional actors conducts performance workshops and other educational activities at many of the participating schools. This tour is similar to Elizabethan touring productions that traveled the countryside each time the plague shook London and city officials closed the playhouses. These Elizabethan touring companies consisted of small casts of players, each of whom played multiple roles, and performed scripts that were adapted accordingly.

http://www.shakespeare.org/