Julius Caesar • 2013 - Chicago Shakespeare Theater

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CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
Tongue Twisters
✪ red leather, yellow leather …(focus on the vertical motion of the mouth)
✪ unique New York…(focus on the front to back movement of the face)
✪ rubber, baby, buggie, bumpers…(focus on the clear repetition of the soft plosives)
✪ Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers…(focus on the clear repetition of hard plosives)
✪ the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, the tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips (focus on crisp and
frontal placement of consonants)
✪ I carried the married character over the barrier (focus on consonants with vowel shading)
✪ toy boat, toy boat, toy boat (focus on the long /o/)
Stage Pictures
✪ shows how varied interpretation is: there is no wrong answer
✪ encourages the students to interpret concepts with their whole bodies
✪ begins to show how the body interprets emotion
You will need a list of very strong descriptive, colorful, emotional words from the script for this activity. Ask your students
to begin walking around the room. Ask them to fill up the entire space, exploring pacing, what it would feel like to be a
different weight, a different height, and ask them to move the center of their body into different places. Encourage them
to see if they feel any emotional differences within these changes. Giving them about three minutes to explore these
changes, see if you notice any particularly interesting discoveries. Encourage these discoveries without necessarily
drawing focus to individual students, as this is a self-reflective activity, but perhaps suggest to the group they might “Try
what it feels like if you slow your pace, hunch your shoulders, droop your head, and move your center into your knees.”
After a few minutes of this exploration, ask your students to find a “neutral” walk. Explain that they are going to create a
stage picture as an entire group. You will give them a word, and then count down from seven. After those seven beats,
you will say freeze, and they must create a photograph of the word you have given them, with their entire body, collectively.
Comment on the emotions you feel from their stage picture. After a couple of words, split the group in half—half will
be in the space and half will be audience. Repeat the process, encouraging the audience’s reactions after each tableau.
This might be a good time to discuss balance, stage direction, and the use of levels as effective variation for the audience’s
visual interpretation.
Shakespeare’s characters are often very physically broad. He created elderly characters and hunchbacked characters;
clowns, star-crossed lovers and cold-blooded killers. These characters call for the actors to figure out how they move.
If the character is greedy, should his center be in a big fat belly? The actor must be prepared to experiment with the
character’s body.
Mirroring
✪ helps build trust within the ensemble
✪ encourages the students to “listen” with all their senses
✪ helps the students reach a state of “relaxed readiness,” which will encourage their impulses, and discourage
their internal censors
Julius Caesar • 2013