Shakespeare’s clowns.

Shakespeare had professional clowns in his acting company. Will Kempe was the most prominent celebrity in the Chamberlain’s Men next to leading man Richard Burbage. He was famous for playing a rustic clown whose specialties included brawling and dancing. He was identified early and often with the use of malapropisms. This comic type is the “natural fool” or one who seems to come by his foolishness naturally.

Ok so I have been TRYING to write this bog for the last couple of weeks now but because of school and work and blah blah blah.... have not been able to do it. But here it is I am finally able to give my thoughts whoo hoo, my apologies for the delay if anybody reads this ;). So the first thing I should mention is I am ECSTATIC to play Kate it is and has always been one of my dream roles! After the initial jumping up and down and screaming I went straight to work on reading the play. I must admit it is a HARD play.

We're in the final stretch with "Fahrenheit 451" and that means TECH-TIME! Doug Hildeman (sceneography), Alex Dugger (sound design), and Nick Loewen (projections) have been working hard to make this show a feast for the eyes and ears. I can't wait to put all their ideas together this week and weekend. You will not believe the things we have in store for you. See you on the 8th!

The following is a primer on the work I recommend for the pre-production study of a Shakespearean part. Just as a carpenter must understand what wood is best suited for his project or a sculptor must know his marble an actor needs to understand the raw material of a classical text. A director cannot do this preparation for you. That is why I think of this part of the process as coaching. We will hopefully have an opportunity to work together on the script before rehearsals begin, one on one. You may do as much or as little of this as you like, you may even disagree with my approach.

What follows is the way I see what actors do in a nutshell, so we can be on the same page. Many of us are experienced actors, some are less so. Please be patient if you know all this. I think it’s good if you know where I’m coming from.

The dystopian wonderland of Fahrenheit 451 (F451) is coming together nicely, and the cast and crew are working hard to make it an incredible experience.

We're less than five weeks away from our May 8th opening, so get us on your calendar; this show will be a "hot" ticket!

-Aaron

We're 3 days from tech week! WOAH! Everything is coming together beautifully and we're in great shape heading into this next week. Big thanks to the cast and crew for all their effort in the past couple of weeks pulling this together.

We're 3 days from tech week! WOAH! Everything is coming together beautifully and we're in great shape heading into this next week. Big thanks to the cast and crew for all their effort in the past couple of weeks pulling this together.

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW:
DIRECTOR’S PRE-PRODUCTION NOTES

What follows is a point of departure for working on our production of Shrew. Nothing is carved in stone. I am very respectful of the collaborative process and look forward to everyone’s contributing their own energy and insights while we work on this play together. But here is my initial vision of the play and the production I am planning – with your help. I hope you find my preliminary ideas to be motivating and maybe inspiring.

Blogging has been in a wild state of flux lately for New World.

We switched from Wordpress to Drupal as our blogging software, because I wanted to make sure that we got the entire application "under one roof," as it were. I still think this was the right decision, but I launched the Drupal-based engine before it was completely ready, and I've been fighting fires ever since.