“Living with Shakespeare”
Our “Living with Shakespeare” Residency encourages your students to experience Shakespeare as the Elizabethans did: with dancing, fighting, music, collaboration, and wordplay.
Our teaching artists will move Shakespeare’s stories and language off the page and into the hearts, bodies, voices, and imaginations of your students as they participate in theater games and activities. Our 5-day Residency works alongside English curricula to introduce Shakespeare’s works and time period to students in an engaging activity-based, theater-centered format. Students will be on their feet learning poetry, history, staging, language, stage-combat, Elizabethan dancing, self-expression, class divisions, and the correlation between Shakespeare and Hip-hop.
The high school curriculum focuses on Romeo & Juliet; middle school curriculum focuses on Much Ado About Nothing.
Romeo & Juliet 5-day Residency Model:
Intro to Shakespeare’s world, language, and iambic pentameter
Tableaux and staging
Shakespeare’s insults and stage-combat
Elizabethan dress, class divisions, and dancing
Cost: $135 per class hour/$675
Live Performance by Seattle Shakespeare Company for participating students:
Make the story come to life by bringing your students to experience a live performance of “Romeo & Juliet” in the historic Gesa Power House Theatre. The Power House is a refurbished power generation plant for the City of Walla Walla designed to mimic the dimensions and layout of the Blackfriars Theatre in London, where many of Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed.
Theater Art EALRS incorporated into residency
1.1: Understands and applies arts concepts and vocabulary
1.2: Develops arts skills and techniques
1.3: Understands and applies arts genres and style of various artists cultures and times.
1.4: Understands and applies audience conventions in a variety of setting and performances of the arts.
2.3: Applies a responding process to an arts performance and/or presentation of dance, music, theatre, and visual arts.
3.1: Uses the arts to express feelings and present ideas
4.2: Demonstrates and analyzes the connections among the arts and between the arts and other content areas.
4.3: Understands how the arts impact and reflect personal choices throughout life.
4.4: Understands how the arts influence and reflect cultures/civilizations, place, and time.
What teachers and students are saying:
The Shakespeare Walla Walla in-school residency program consistently produces excitement in the classroom. Students enjoy having guest volunteers presenting new and interesting ideas.
” As they read [Shakespeare], the students are able to gain a mental picture of what is happening in the story because of what they learned in the residency. They learned that Shakespeare truly shaped our language and literature as we know it today, and as a result, they are loving what we are doing despite the density of the language.” – College Place High School
“On ‘Learn How to Fight Day’, 100% of the female students (rather than shy away and claim wearing a skirt as a reason not to participate, as many of them do in PE class) eagerly asked to be allowed to change into the PE clothes to be better prepared to engage in the activity! The boys rose up to the challenge of medieval dance as well!” -Walla Walla Valley Academy
“The energy of [the teaching artists] frees the students to experiment and take risks. Combining information delivery with physicality creates and maintains interest. The two girls in my room right now said, ‘We had fun while learning –I still remember the dance part — yeah, on a scale of 1-10, it was a 10.” -DeSales High School
“One little, quiet girl who hasn’t really said much in class all year was chosen to perform one of the characters in [Romeo & Juliet] Act 1, Scene 1. By the time the scene was done, the whole class was in shock. She was an awesome actress! Ashe felt good about herself and the class had a new respect for her. Very cool.” -Walla Walla High School
From Walla Walla High School Freshmen:
“Last week was one of my favorite weeks this year.”
“You definitely changed my perspective of Shakespeare from boring to fascinating!”
“Thank you SWW for making school so much fun!”
R&J performers from Seattle Shakespeare pose with over 250 students after the show.
For more information, contact Katy at Shakespeare Walla Walla Education.