Mmmm, a nice lie in on Tuesday! Tuesday was a pretty academic day compared to the others we have had recently. In the morning we met with Tony Howard, a professor at Warrick University who gave a lecture on Romeo and Juliet in Film. I enjoyed his use of several of the older films I was unfamiliar with as well as the Zepherelli and the Baz Lurhman versions.
In the afternoon we had our first of two classes with Stewart Pierce, the “Master of Communication.” Stewart is a trip! He is the yin to Glynn’s yang. In Stewart’s introduction of himself he promptly told us that he learned from Laurence Olivier and was the voice coach to Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di. He also quickly told us that after we left if we needed to work with his technique we could buy his CD on his website! Now if anyone else had said that I would have written them off in a second, however Stewart can get away with that stuff and still be adored. It is of course, his voice. He sounds like a cross between Barry White and Patrick Stewart, in fact if Stewart Pierce ever decided to use his powers for evil… I am sure he would have his own cult of followers!
Not only did Stewart do several exercises with us on breath and “finding our note” ie- centering your voice in the correct octave and mixing the treble and bass; he also spoke quite passionately about the importance of language and sound in Elizabethan England. Elizabethan’s believed that sound was the core of creation (no wonder we say the big bang and not the big light!) When we talk about persona, and you look at the roots of the word- per sona meaning through sound, you realize that when people spoke of personality really they were speaking of their sound. And doesn’t this make sense when you think about how we judge people based on what they say- but if we are honest how they say it… Stewart’s exercises were very popular with everyone- he taught us to center our voices with the statement “San I have a cup of tea please.” For the rest of the say all we did was tell each other we wanted tea…
Wednesday was also an academic event. We had our second and last meeting with Giles (master of words!) at 9am. I have to admit I was a little worried about this because the previous session had been a bit jumbly, but I was pleasantly surprised by his lesson on troches, and the use of prose as apposed to text. Again these are not new ideas to me but Giles went more in depth looking at original pronunciation and how this would effect the sound of the troche. He also worked through the beginning of As You Like It with us looking at when Rosalind and Cecilia move out of prose and into verse, the meter of the heart. Here are some interesting statistics Giles shared with us: Shakespeare’s works as a whole are 65% blank verse, 10% rhyming verse, and 25% prose. As well it is estimated that Shakespeare coined ONE THIRD of the words he used. We think he was the first to use the word ‘pity.’ He created ‘puppy-dog.’ What absolute genius is required to do that.
After our session with Giles we met with Peter Mack a professor also from Warwick University. As a woman on the trip said, you couldn’t have gotten a better ‘genius frazzled professor from central casting! Peter has a beard to rival Nostradamus and he would stroke it while contemplating. I imagine had we seen them his socks would have been miss matched because he wouldn’t have noticed in the morning as he was too deep in thought to focus with such mundane chores as getting dressed. In short, the genius frazzled professor. Peter came to speak to up about Elizabethan education- a topic very interesting especially considering the authorship questions. I have to sadly admit that I along with my classmates probably understood a mere 20% of what he told us. You do come up against this problem in teaching when you have to discover the lowest common denominator or knowledge in the class in order to speak in terms that they understand. Unfortunately for us Giles is sooooo familiar with the classical texts, Cato, Plautus, Cicero, Virgil, Aphthonius… that his specific references became a foreign language for parts of his lecture. I was quite interested in his explanation of a “common place book” which I think I will assign to my students this year! (Hooray students! More work!)
Wednesday evening we had our 3rd rehearsal for our scene. The tension in the room is growing as the English teachers move further and further out of their comfort zones without explanation why from Ann. We have begun a bit of blocking (thank goodness) and have added in a shall. Basically the four Juliet’s are taking on a chorus of Matrons and statues through out the beginning. Did I mention the rehearsal rooms aren’t air conditioned? Oh how we suffer for our art;-)
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