A Shakespeare Workshop
On Tuesday, 10 September 2024, both English "advanced classes" of year Q2 and their teachers, Mrs. Kaufmann and Mr. Arentz, participated in a Shakespeare workshop with an actor and voice coach of the Royal Shakespeare Company. This theater company was founded by Peter Hall in 1961 to make Shakespeare accessible to everyone. Today it is an international theatre company with three permanent theater spaces in Stratford-upon-Avon and over a million visitors a year. They perform plays by Shakespeare, his contemporaries as well as present-day playwrights. Moreover, they are famous because they are the only performing arts organization with Independent Research Organization status and they do research on the influence of arts on everyday life.The main topics of the workshop were gender and identity, using the example of Shakespeare's Macbeth, which fit perfectly to current compulsory topics on our curriculum. The actor, Julius D'Silva, first taught the students some warm-up exercises done by the Royal Shakespeare Company before performances and by students at Oxford University before exams. Julius, with his open and funny nature, was able to get everyone excited about the exercises and appealed to all participants with his knowledge of German words. He assured the students that nothing they would be doing would be embarrassing and that the room was a safe space, which made everyone really comfortable. He also taught us how to use our voices to create meaning behind statements and let the audience understand the emotions displayed.
This workshop was an unforgettable experience that we will certainly benefit from for a very long time. A really big "thank you" goes to Julius, who put a lot of effort into the preparation and led us through the workshop very confidently and enthusiastically. A big "thank you" also goes to the Förderverein of Gymnasium am Oelberg as they kindly covered some of the expenses for the workshop. Without them, this experience would not have been possible.
by Lilia Eichler, Q2
