Name: Shakespeare Workshop with Di Trevis
Start: 2024-12-16T10:00:00+01:00
End: 2024-12-18T17:00:00+01:00
Location: Brunnenstraße , 10115 Berlin, Germany

Actors are often overwhelmed by complex text. This workshop will dispel those fears and give you simple practical exercises which render the text more and more understandable and actable. We will examine the verse form, the move from prose to poetry, the complex building bricks of the great speeches with practice of the rhetorical devices which Shakespeare inherited and then brilliantly developed. We will look at an Elizabethan dance to find clues to the physical life of the characters and by the end of the workshop I would hope you would feel ready to perform a monologue in English and or German.
DI TREVIS: Di Trevis has had a long career in the British theatre where she started as an actor in theatre, television and film. She became a director in 1982 and subsequently joined the Royal Shakespeare Theatre with productions of Taming of the Shrew, Brecht’s Happy End, Turner’s Revenger’s Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. She was the first woman to run a company at National Theatre and in her opening season directed Brecht’s The Mother, Moliere’s School for Wives and Lorca’s Yerma. She adapted Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past with Harold Pinter, which she directed at the Olivier Theatre and won an Olivier award for.
She has always run a teaching career alongside her productions in the theatre, teaching workshops and seminars before joining the Drama Centre, London, as Head of Directing. She has revelled extensively in her work teaching in Germany, Australia, Cuba, Austria, the United States (where she did productions with her own company at the Artaud Theatre, San Francisco, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh and The University of California.) Eleven years ago, she established the Jerwood workshop for young professional actors. Over the years she has led workshops on a multiplicity of subjects including Greek Drama, the tragic and comic mask, the Jacobeans, Restoration Comedy, Chekov, Ibsen, American naturalism, Pinter, Coward, Wilde, Becket, New Writing and most recently Scenes of Struggle including work by O’Casey, Odets, Synge and Brecht. She has directed Shakespeare in English, German, French, Romanian and Arabic. Running under all this has been an emphasis on Shakespeare as a source of brilliant writing, every kind of acting demand and the delicate balance between technique and emotional release.