ABOUT OUR PROJECT
A Letter From our Managing Director
Founded two years ago, in 2018, The Shakespeare Project is a community development program which offers professional performances of Shakespeare’s plays, free of charge, to high school audiences and the public at large in northeast Alabama. Our venue is the Anniston Performing Arts Center (APAC), an excellent facility which, however, is on the campus of an underserved urban high school. We chose this facility not only because it is excellent in every way—for its acoustics and its capacity (1,175 seats)—but also because of its history. It was the birthplace, in 1972, of The Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which in 1985 moved to a luxurious independent facility in Montgomery, Alabama, where it has flourished ever since. We have chosen the APAC as the permanent venue for The Shakespeare Project, therefore, in part as a symbolic gesture: we want to revive this city’s cultural legacy and, more broadly, enrich this region’s cultural life.
The thirst for professional Shakespearean performances is here. We have had two successful seasons. In August of 2018, we presented eight consecutive performances of Julius Caesar to more than 2,000 area students and 700 community members. Last August, 2019, eight performances of Macbeth drew over 1700 students and 1200 community members. The main roles—along with the stage managers, the lighting and sound technicians, and the costume and set designers—are hired professionals who compete for the job through auditions and applications.
Our efforts, however, go beyond the performances. High school students, for example, may join our apprenticeship program, which allows them to work alongside the professionals, and to be paid for their work. The play we perform, in fact, is decided upon by the consensus of the local high school teachers: it will be the play that most of them will be covering in their fall or spring classes. And for the area high school teachers—in many cases English teachers who, with little or no training, find themselves having to stage plays and teach drama—we offer lectures and workshops on how to make Shakespeare come to life for young students. We have even provided some funding for high schools that cannot afford the cost of busing their students to the APAC.
Our hired professionals commit themselves not only to the performances but to our broader cultural vision as well. Part of their agreement requires them to conduct some of the workshops for area students and teachers. Carmine Di Biase, a full-time English professor specializing in Shakespeare here Jacksonville State University (JSU), volunteers his own time to conduct some of these workshops, which he tailors to the play we are performing.
Serving also as dramaturg, Di Biase oversees the writing of an original and comprehensive study guide, based on our current production. The guide is made available to all interested high school teachers well before the first performance, whether or not they can bring students to the performances. These guides include a plot summary, a list of difficult words, basic historical and biographical material specific to the play, ideas for further study, and our own performance script, which is cut so as not to exceed ninety minutes (apart from modernizing the spelling, however, we do not simplify the text). Di Biase wrote our first study guide, for Julius Caesar, himself, but last summer, for Macbeth, he engaged several of our best JSU undergraduates to write sections of it: this experience introduced our students to the unique satisfaction of community service. And this collaborative process, which is fully in the spirit of our apprentice program, is what we will adopt for next season.
It has been moving to see how engaged our audiences have been. For most of the students, this is their very first experience of Shakespeare. Our Artistic Director, Carrie Colton, who is an expert in teaching young actors, choreographed brilliant fight scenes for our Julius Caesar and Macbeth. That emphasis on action, together with our 90-minute performance scripts and spectacular set designs, kept our audiences enthralled. Invariably, during our talkbacks, which our dramaturg conducts after every performance, several high school students will ask, “How can I be part of this?” Our undertaking does much, we believe, to strengthen relations between JSU and northeast Alabama, and because of this, our goal is to keep the project going on a yearly basis.
The Shakespeare Project was conceived by our Executive Director, Emily Duncan when she was working for the Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce. She continues to serve as Executive Director, now that the project is under the auspices of JSU, which cannot fund it but which does support it in concrete ways. The university allows us to use its own theatre for rehearsals, costume creation and set building. A handful of local businesses have also made invaluable in-kind donations (such as fabric, stage furniture, and even meals for our crew). The local support, in short, has been strong.
Our next performance will be Twelfth Night, and it is scheduled for early January of 2021. We have moved our performance date to January for practical reasons. Since classes are not in session, the JSU theatre facilities are more likely to be free at that time for our rehearsals, costume production, and stage building, and the high school students and their teachers are more available then as well. Performances, however, which again are free of charge, are also open to the general public. We hope to see you all at Twelfth Night!
Sincerely,
Carmine Di Biase
Dramaturg and Managing Director
The Shakespeare Project
Email: cdibiase@jsu.edu
Telephone: 256-435-7136