Theatre Workshop Exercises (Adapting Shakespeare)

I called this session as I’ve been asked to teach a university workshop, off the back of a show I wrote and performed at Edinburgh Fringe last year.

The workshop is about adapting Hamlet for contemporary performance so exercises discussed generally relate to that, but the discussion also touched on good teaching practice and people’s favourite theatre exercises and games.

One participant mentioned Ben Crystal and 1623, a practitioner and company who both work with Shakespeare to address contemporary themes. 1623 uses it as a jumping off point to explore social justice issues, looking at characters’ worlds and backstories, gender relations, untold stories/negative space, class relations and status. Useful to find parallels within the work to contemporary experiences of inequality and injustice.

Someone asked ‘How do you want the participants to feel?’ My answer was ‘Inspired, creative and like they have lots of opportunities’. The reflection then turned to: When do I feel that way? How can I channel that feeling in myself and pass it onto the students?

Someone suggested getting them on their feet and doing things rather than focussing on written work.

People mentioned the importance of maintaining authority as a workshop leader, and of setting clear ground rules at the beginning.



EXERCISES

Buzzy Bees (fun and silly) — getting students to make shapes with their bodies based on a letter that begins with …
- Eliminative so the group decides who has made the least compelling image each round

Tableaux (collaborative and visual) — building from the last game, adding in specifics from the text and getting them to work together to create images, e.g. ‘funeral meats’ or other lines/moments from the play

The Expert (storytelling, collaboration) — one person is a lecturer talking about a particular subject and people behind have to show what they are describing. The lecturer then turns around and has to incorporate what they see.
- Best if the performers mess with the expert and throw them curveballs

Typewriter (storytelling, physicalisation) — one person is the ‘writer’ and tells a story while the other performers behind them have to act it out.
- Exits and entrances are great
- Lots of comic potential

Hot Spots — getting actors to make statements about an issue, e.g. ‘Hamlet is a fundamentally misogynistic play’ and then getting students to stand in proximate relation to how much they agree/disagree.
- Find the issues that split the room — these are the interesting questions to explore

Intro to Improve:
- ‘Yes that’s right’: one person makes statements and the other person agrees
- ‘Yes and’: Two people go back and forwards building on a story
- ‘Fortunately/unfortunately’: Two people go back and forth building a story with sentences that begin with alternating ‘fortunately/unfortunately …’
- Arm in Arm — two people with arms linked go around telling a story one word at a time to narrate what they are doing

‘The Exquisite Corpse’ — a game where a particular sentence structure can be recreated with substituting any word for a word of the same type (e.g. adjective for another adjective). The group goes round and builds with one word each. Structured creativity.

Mapping archetypes — choosing characters/settings/archetypes from the play and mapping them onto contemporary equivalents, e.g. the castle as Trump Tower

Broom tossing — getting people to throw a wooden stick (the weight of a broom handle) across the room. Focus on how they can receive it smoothly. Build the number of brooms
- Another variant is getting people to stand in a circle and pass the broom handles in a circle; then get the circle to move around in the opposite direction

Clapping games — splitting a circle up into different segments and getting students to clap contrapuntal rhythms

Using paintings as a prompt — take a painting, then get participants to act out ‘what happens next’

Consequences — getting students to write a word on a piece of paper, then the next draws a picture, folds down the word, the next person has to come up with the word off the picture, then folds down the picture etc. — a bit like Chinese whispers with visual stimuli