Course | Summer School

Summer Academy for Historical Acting

Date

Monday 1 August 2022 - Sunday 7 August 2022

Explanation

This Summer Academy is FULL.

Location

Huizinga Building
Doelensteeg 16
Leiden

The Summer School for Historical Acting, organized by Jed Wentz, gives students the chance to focus on the basic techniques of acting from the long eighteenth century. The attitudes, gestures and rhetorical declamation suitable for the stage will be practiced using handbooks and exercises from the period. Facial expression and affect will be studied in the context of monologues and short theatrical scenes. The goal is to give students tools for expressing spoken and sung texts using appropriate historical techniques, which will in turn affect the sound, timing and impact of their performances.

The daily group classes on gesture, declamation, walking, standing, sitting and even sleeping on stage will be source based, so that students can continue to work on their own after the course has finished. All faculty members are musicians.

For those interested in rhetorical gesture and acting according to historical sources, this course trains the performer’s voice, body and emotions. An intensive 7-day workshop with 8 students and 4 faculty offers an immersive introduction to the basics of 18th-century stagecraft.

Final presentation

On 7 August, the students will give a final presentation at the Theatre of the Leidse Volkshuis. For more information, please contact [e-mail].