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Shakespeare Acting Class with Becky Kemper

Unlock your most powerful, articulate and passionate performer! Join nationally recognized vocal coach, director, and rhetorician Becky Kemper for a 6-week exploration of Shakespeare's language and how to use it most effectively and physically on stage. Whether you are an experienced Shakespearean player or an actor befuddled by the fancy words, scared of the Bard, you will unearth a playable, powerful, and personal connection to Shakespeare's dramatic poetry. Together the class will use both individual monologue work and group exercises to discover the many acting clues hidden within Shakespeare's verse and rhetoric, and build the skills needed to use these clues onstage in any setting from cold reading to full production.

Becky Kemper has acted, directed, and produced professional Shakespeare for over 20 years with some of the most respected theaters in America. She is a classical text teacher at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, holds an MFA and a Master of Letters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance from the American Shakespeare Center/Blackfriar's Playhouse, and has served as the Artistic Director of the Metawhateverphor Theater in NYC, the Director of Education for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, and the chairperson of the Artistic Council for the Shakespeare Theater Association. Prior to moving to the Bay Area, Becky was the Producing Artistic and Casting Director of the Maryland Shakespeare Festival, an equity theater company she founded in 1999 where she developed an acclaimed performance laboratory to train actors in her Rhetorical Staging Techniques. She has presented her research into the dramatic use of rhetoric at numerous national conferences and theatrical workshops, and has been published in the online journal, Shakespeare Criticism. With a BFA from NYU, her acting and directing projects have taken her to such places as Russia, China, and the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. She is currently the Director of Training at San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, as well as training as a Linklater voice teacher. Becky will be directing Merry Wives of Windsor at the African American Shakespeare Company next season.