The 2010-11 school year marked the second year of Ohio State’s partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company which culminated in mid-July with a production of the RSC’s Romeo and Juliet on the Scarlet and Gray Stage in the Park Avenue Armory as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. The July 9th arts page of the New York Times ran its first review of the RSC’s five-play festival season with the following statement: “. . . .Let’s take time to cheer the audacity and ambition of the enterprise, a co-presentation of the Lincoln Center Festival and the Park Avenue Armory in association with Ohio State University. (Thanks, Buckeyes!) It’s unquestionably the theatrical event of the New York summer.” July 12th was the Gala event dedicated to this innovative partnership.
Local teachers and M.F.A. Actors teamed up throughout the year to work in local classrooms with students in grades 1-12 and to take part in professional development workshops as part of the Stand Up for Shakespeare program while the Arts Initiative and Ohio State Theatre stepped up the “See It Live” component of the partnership by offering two productions in winter quarter. RSC Senior Voice and Text Coach Alison Bomber guest directed a 90-minute Othello with the M.F.A. Actors. 1170 students from Columbus City Schools and Reynoldsburg attended five special school matinee performances in the Roy Bowen Theatre. Robin Post directed a 60-minute, eight-person undergraduate tour of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that culminated in two near capacity performances at the Lincoln Theatre. Over 2500 students saw this lively and imaginatively staged production.
June 22-29 the Arts Initiative hosted RSC lead practitioner Rachel Gartside, as well as Jonathan Neelands and Paul Prescott from the UK’s University of Warwick, and Rob Elkington from RSC Education, for an intensive workshop with forty teachers, MFAs, faculty members and graduate students. The “Train the Trainers” session, as it was called, aimed at creating a team of Columbus-based practitioners who can work in support of current and future Stand Up for Shakespeare participants. This group enjoyed a Meet and Greet event welcoming the RSC’s Young People’s production of Hamlet which had six performances (June 25-27) at the Columbus Performing Arts Center in association with CATCO-Phoenix.
The “Train the Trainers” cohort, joining other OSU students, took a chartered bus to New York to attend the July 12 Gala. On July 13 the third cohort took part in a day-long symposium organized by RSC Education entitled “The Classroom as Rehearsal Room” whose participants included New York teachers as well as the Columbus contingent, featured opening remarks by RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd and Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education. The day continued with workshops presented by Columbus teams of teachers and actors who shared teaching strategies and the benefits of using Shakespeare with young people.
Autumn 2011 launches the Year of Shakespeare, a celebration of the RSC’s first three years in central Ohio which concludes in May with a Young People’s Shakespeare Festival. See artsinitiative.osu.edu for full details.
GCAC Presents is a bi-weekly column brought to you by the Greater Columbus Arts Council – supporting art and advancing culture in Columbus – in partnership with the Columbus Arts Marketing Association, a professional development and networking association of arts marketers. Each column will be written by a different local arts organization to give you an insiders look at the arts in Columbus.
