HVSF Actors Modernize Shakespeare for PHS Freshman

How doth one make interesting the works of William Shakespeare to the younglings of a current age?  Simply- thou must modernize.

For over five years now, ninth grade English students at Peekskill High School have had the privilege of participating in the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s Five Week Residency program as part of their freshman year curriculum. The program comes to the school thanks to a grant from the Frog Rock Foundation and pairs students with teaching artists from the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, which is based out of Garrison, New York.

This year, at the end of the five week workshop, the HVSF troupe gave a culminating performance of Much Ado About Nothing – Shakespeare’s beloved comedy. To make the play more relatable to a young generation, the actors gave it a modern twist by taking the story into the digital age and incorporating the use of present day technology, such as cell phones and social networks.

“This has been a long-time collaboration for many years now,” said PHS English teacher and Department Chair Todd Newby. “Each year the actors perform a different Shakespeare play and bring its themes to life for our students.”

The program’s goal is to first expose students to the works of Shakespeare through the point of view of an actor. Throughout each workshop students play a series of games and exercises that are meant to take the text off the page and get the students interacting with it by using their bodies, their voices and their creativity.

“The text is very important, but often students find that when they first interact with it, they spend most of their energy just fighting to get the language,” said Teddy Alvaro, a HVSF resident teaching artist who helped run this year’s workshops at PHS. ‘We hope that by coming at the text from a character point of view, that students will develop a more personal relationship to it.”

Students who attended the workshops said that they appreciated the opportunity to familiarize themselves with Shakespeare through acting, and that they would like to be able to participate in the program again in the future.

“I like that were able to interact with the coaches and get a taste of what acting is like,” said PHS freshman Nia Robinson. “I had a lot of fun and I’d like to do it again. I’m glad I got this experience. Sometimes it’s hard to understand Shakespeare, but when you see it, it helps because you have that visual to guide you.”

Students will continue their study of Shakespeare in the classroom as they prepare to begin reading Romeo and Juliet.

“I think it is tremendous to bring a program like this to the students because they get to experience Shakespeare in a way that they enjoy,” Newby said. “They really get it and understand that the same things Shakespeare wrote about in his time are still alive today. It all makes the lessons fun and relevant.”