The Bardathon

Well I am now in the wonderful little town of Stratford-Upon-Avon! It's fairly small and just about everything here has to do with Shakespeare in some way or another (except the local H&M that I hit up this afternoon). So I guess I will start from the beginning of our exciting adventure here...

Sunday me and Kelsey went to Trinity Church. This is where Shakespeare is buried. I was really expecting the place to be practically empty as the old historic touristy trap churches were in Dublin. It was actually a hoppin place. There were families and young people and older people. But most of all the worship seemed genuine rather than just a worn out ritual like the other places. So I really enjoyed that. We're going to visit the church later as a tourist attraction so I'll talk about it more later.

Then me and Kelsey took a beautiful walk along the Avon River.

There was like a market going down and people picnicking everywhere. But best of all....there were puppies EVERYWHERE! I really liked this one because it reminded me of Tebow's favorite activity.

Then on Monday we began our classes at the wonderful Shakespeare Centre. It's adjacent to the Birthplace and basically we're like VIPS. On Monday we had a talk on Russian Theatre as we are seeing some Russian plays that had their international premiere here in Stratford only a few weeks ago.

After lunch we had a presentation of what is in the Library they have there. It's really fascinating actually. They have very old editions of Shakespeare's plays as well as things written by his contemporaries, but also they have extensive collections of various memorabilia from many of the productions of Shakespeare put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. They had pictures, videos, scripts and this ridiculous book (I forgot the term) that the director (or stage manager) makes all the notes in about blocking, props, lighting, etc.

Then we went to visit Shakespeare's birthplace. It was a neat little building.

Overall, I honestly wasn't too impressed with it. It began with this cheesy little intro that was weird. But really it's just that nothing in the house is authentic and looks very out of place in the house. None of the furniture or anything is original and they had very few artifacts from Shakespeare's actual life. This is understandable as he lived over 400 years ago. I guess it was just so built up in my head that it was kinda a let down. This is the room where they think he was actually born, if you can see this tiny picture.

Then Tuesday we had a day of lectures, I won't bore you with details but we basically talked about gender roles in his plays and the effect his hometown had on him and his works. After that we walked to Anne Hathaway's cottage which was Shakespeare's wife's childhood home.

The house itself was quaint and the inside was presented, in my opinion, much better than Shakespeare's birthplace. There were some pieces of furniture that were actually older than the 21st century. They also had beautiful gardens and grounds at the cottage.

Then last night we went to see a production of a play called "The Grain Store". This play was commissioned in a project called "Revolutions" done by the RSC. The gave commissions to several upcoming Russian playwrights to write plays for the RSC to perform while exploring what post-Soviet Union Russia is like.

So another cool thing was that when we got there they were filming for a TV special they're doing on the play (since this is its international premiere). I got really excited when I walked in and saw that notice and then while we were waiting the camera people kept coming up to me and asking me to hold my ticket a certain way and pretend like I was reading it to my friend, etc (movie star?). So I was like awesome, I might be on British TV! And then as we were walking into the theatre the camera appeared out of nowhere over my shoulder and I heard the producer person be like "We'll just follow her in". Yes!

It was a very very interesting play. It covered the history of the famine in Russia during the 1930s during which millions of people in the Soviet Union died of hunger. This was due mostly to the fact that the government was confiscating food form the people. Anyway this play follows the history of the playwright's grandmother (although I didn't know that as I was watching the play). Cool fact: the actress who played Mrs. Figg in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was in the play!

She was fantastic, as was the rest of the cast. I wish I had more space to talk further about the play, but this post is already too long!

So I was leaving the theatre and, guess what?! The camera people came up and asked "Can we interview you really quickly?" I was like "I thought you'd never ask." (I didn't actually say that fyi). So I'm basically famous now. And the TV show airs after I leave here so I'll never see it anyway.

Today we had more classes with a lecture to talk about the play we saw, which was very helpful in understanding everything. But the coolest thing was that we got to have a Q&A session with the main actress in the play (Samantha Young)! She was really nice and Scottish too. Apparently we get to have these conversations with someone from every play we are seeing here!

Then this afternoon we got to take a voice class which was so much fun! It wasn't like singing, but looking at a monologue and dissecting the sounds and structure of it. We never had to talk out loud by ourselves but we did a lot of cool exercises to get in touch with the rhythm of the words. We did a lot of walking around and reading at the same time, which is actually harder than it sounds...