Shakespeare & Company To Host Two-Day Acting Workshop In April

Shakespeare & Company's Center for Actor Training will hold a two-day acting workshop titled Tuning Your Instrument at its Lenox, Mass. campus in the Berkshires on Thursday, April 20, and Friday, April 21.

This special addition to Shakespeare & Company's actor training workshops, led by the Company's Director of Training Sheila Bandyopadhyay and Producing Associate Ariel Bock, offers a deep-dive into Linklater Voice and Pure Movement practices that can help strengthen participants' connection to their instruments, and to develop open channels for breath, sound, and physical expression.

Tuning Your Instrument will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, and tuition is $200 USD. Single-occupancy dorm rooms are available for an additional $45 per night.

Actors at all experience levels are welcome; Tuning Your Instrument is ideal for any artist familiar with voice and body work seeking to revisit the practices, and can also serve as an addition for those attending the Lenox Weekend Intensive April 21 - 23*. Discounted tuition ($150) is available to those also attending the Lenox Weekend Intensive.

For more information or to apply, visit shakespeare.org.

*The Lenox Weekend Intensive slated for April 21-23 is currently sold out.

About the Center for Actor Training

Shakespeare & Company's curriculum is internationally recognized as a deeply effective training experience for actors who aspire to bring their talent, intuition, and spirit to a higher level. Through the Center for Actor Training, actors, directors, writers, and teachers from all over the world come to work with the Company's faculty to train their voices and their bodies with a daily regimen of demanding classes, and to delve deeply into their own imaginations, intellects, and emotional lives.

Faculty Bios

Sheila Bandyopadhyay is the Director of Training for Shakespeare & Company, leading its Center for Actor Training. A director, deviser, movement specialist, Alexander Technique and yoga teacher, Bandyopadhyay has been part of the faculty at Shakespeare & Company since 2007. Her Movement Direction credits include Macbeth (The Humanist Project); Mother Courage and her Children, The Cherry Orchard (American Academy of Dramatic Arts Company); Hamlet, Measure for Measure (NYU Gallatin), and Twelfth Night (FSU Conservatory/Asolo Rep). She has directed shows in New York at the Brick, the United Solo Festival (Theater Row), the Tank, the Women in Theater Festival (the Gural), the West End Theater, and the 72nd St Theater Lab. Bandyopadhyay's favorite roles include Stephano in The Tempest (Stages on the Sound), Tamora in Titus Andronicus (The Humanist Project) and Bianca/Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew (Tempest Ladies). She is a proud member of the Humanist Project and a sponsored artist with Leviathan Lab.

Ariel Bock has been an actor, director, and voice teacher at Shakespeare & Company for more than 20 years, and as an Artistic Associate there since 1995. She has also been on the faculty as an acting or voice teacher at Dartmouth College, Smith College, and MIT, and has led many workshops both for professional and pre-professional actors and for those interested in Theater-in-Education.

Photo Caption: 2019 Month-long Intensive. Movement class. Photo by Christina Lane.