Park Avenue Armory And RSC Presents YPS' KING LEAR

Park Avenue Armory and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) will bring a new Young People's Shakespeare (YPS) production of King Lear to New York during the last two weeks of October 2012, playing to more than 1,000 underserved New York City public school students invited by Park Avenue Armory. The performances at the Armory will be filmed by the RSC’s in-house filming team working with a local crew and production manager. A specially commissioned DVD version, which will include supporting education resources for teachers and students, will be given by New York City’s Department of Education to every school in NYC in Spring 2013, reaching more than 1 million students.

The new collaboration is a direct result of the RSC’s six week residency last summer at Park Avenue Armory, which included YPS productions of Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors supported by pre and post-show educational workshops provided by RSC ensemble actors and Park Avenue Armory teaching artists. The YPS productions were presented in the historic Board of Officers Room at the Armory to underserved young audiences from Out of School Time summer programs invited as part of Park Avenue Armory’s ongoing education program. They were part the RSC’s six-week residency in New York, a co-presentation by Lincoln Center Festival and Park Avenue Armory in association with The Ohio State University, in which the RSC presented five Shakespeare plays on an exact replica of the RSC’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which was erected in the Armory’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall.

The RSC’s YPS for 2012 will be a newly crafted 70-minute production of King Lear developed especially for young audiences aged 8 and upwards. Directed by Tim Crouch, it will be an explosive first introduction to Shakespeare for students who are least likely to access this work. The YPS series is a key part of the RSC’s education mission and the Company has been creating these edited versions of Shakespeare plays since 2008 as a way of transforming student experiences of Shakespeare. The program is inspired by the RSC’s Stand up for Shakespeare manifesto which calls for young people to Do Shakespeare on their Feet, See it Live and Start it Early.

A hallmark of Park Avenue Armory’s education program is sustained engagement with underserved New York City public school students, who learn to “think outside the box” conceptually and imaginatively. Through both exposure to world class artists and examination of the creative process over a range of artistic disciplines, the Armory gives students the tools and the freedom to think creatively and boldly in a setting that is inspirational and magical.

In addition to seeing the play, Park Avenue Armory and the RSC have custom-designed a series of educational workshops to prepare the students for their first exposure to a Shakespeare play and to help them assess and contextualize what they have experienced. Each student will participate in three workshops led by RSC practitioners and the Armory’s talented corps of teaching artists. The first workshop will provide an introduction to King Lear and Shakespeare’s language. The second will take place as a pre-performance session highlighting the major plot points of the story the students are about to experience and a post-performance Q&A session with RSC ensemble actors from King Lear. The final workshop will occur a week after the students attend the performances, and will help them process their experience by using visual art, music, and/or movement to express what they’ve learned.

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