TheAlternativeSpace
o u t o f n o t h i n g ... something comes ...
TheatrE¦ShakespearE¦BeinG
UNDOING ¦ UNLEARNING ¦ UNBEING
AlternativeShakespeare
Shakespeare's gifts to us are many, fact. Whilst this will always stay true,
equally another fact is the world today is very different from the world
of his time. Add to this, there is much more to Shakespeare than is
immediately obvious from the legacy of his plays and poems,
The process behind each of our projects starts with an understanding of a
chosen Shakespeare work. We then 'mine' it for anything that
would make a different sense in an alternative context.
We workshop selected characters, words, and themes to discover
alternative possibilities. Staying faithful to the creative genius
of Shakespeare is critical at this stage.
The workshop material provides us with ideas of how it
can be recreated in another guise, using
additional new words.
AlternativeTheatre
theatre with a beat!
All our work comes under The AlernativeTheatre Company banner.
If you would like to see more details, please click here.
Alternative Shakespeare Projects
PERFORMED PROJECTS
(details will appear here soon)
Romeo & Juliet for All Time
Macbeth Killing Time
Tempestfugit: Prospero's Dream
Time Out of Joint
Ophelia, Princess of Denmark
King Lear (alone)
An Audience with Falstaff
Cordelia / Fool
Romeo & Juliet: The Confessions
CURRENT PROJECTS
(details will appear here soon)
I, Lady Macbeth
I, Juliet Capulet
The Suffocating of Queen Gertrude
Here is where we put into practice our beliefs and our instincts, to see just how well the practice supports the theory. From this body of work, research papers will be written so that other practitioners can judge the effectiveness of the Project outcomes. Shakespeare's gifts to us are many, fact.
Whilst this will always stay true, equally another fact is the world today
is very different from the world of his time. Add to this,
there is much more to Shakespeare than is
immediately obvious from the legacy
of his plays and poems,
This body of work has four distinct but interconnected standards;
Shakespeare's Bones
writing completely new works inspired directly and indirectly out of Shakespeare plays.
Living Shakespeare
learning and discovering what Shakespeare's written legacy is all about.
Shakespeare's Soul
exploring the contribution he made to our understanding of what it is to be a Human Being
Beyond Shakespeare
expressing the forces that drove Shakespeare's contribution to our knowledge of what it means to be human in new ways.
Please click here to go to the Alternative Shakespeare Collaboration website.
Shakespeare's Dream
This is our first play, and to this day it very much underpins all our work.
What's it all about?
A night in the Life of William Shakespeare, a night when characters from his actual life and from his plays came together, a multi-scene kaleidoscope of fast-moving, thematic driven characters.
Why the Play?
We wanted to explore how the mind of Shakespeare worked, so we identified themes that seemed to crop up consistently throughout Shakespeare's works. We also wanted to see how well the identified individual characters and quotations would gel together.
How the Play came about
It was our very first play, and very much a baptism of fire. 2 years in the writing, followed by a year of workshops, rehearsals, and re-writings, before it was performed by a cast of 14 professional and community actors in Birmingham. All in all, over 50 creatives have been involved in the work.
What did we achieve
In direct outputs, a professionally staged play (Time After Time) and, some years down the line, a book based on the play. In the course of the process we discovered the rich treasures of working in collaboration, and in mounting the production we learnt the value of taking risks and trusting that it all comes good in the end!
