SGCNZ National Shakespeare Schools Production 2019

Shakespeare Fired Up 

Witches, fairies and soldiers will fire up the stages in the culminating performances at Pipitea Marae on 5 October and the Legislative Chamber at Parliament on 6 October by the 46 young actors and student directors, selected from Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand’s (SGCNZ) Regional and National University of Otago Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festivals (UOSWSF) throughout the country to attend SGCNZ National Shakespeare Schools Production week.

Forty minutes of scenes from Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V will be directed by James Cain, Terence Crawford and Erina Daniels, respectively, with these highly talented and innovative young people. 

The winners of the SGCNZ/Morrison Music Trust and Costume Design Competition will be the Student Composer and Costumier for the productions. Indicative costuming will identify the role sharing which occurs to allow all the chance to ‘shine’! 

Being held residentially at St Patrick’s College Silverstream in the first week of the September/October school holidays, the 48 students will do Workshops for half of each day with luminaries including Sir Jon Trimmer, Julian Raphael, and others covering a range of allied art forms. For the other half of each day they will, in their three pre-allocated groups, be cast, learn their lines and rehearse in their scenes, and then perform them to the public after just five half days! 

“With a branding of being a life skills enhancing organisation through Shakespeare, SGCNZ provides challenges to increase the young people’s personal development and give them confidence in their own ability,” commented SGCNZ CEO, Dawn Sanders. 

The students are encouraged to input into the development process of their scenes, and others take on roles to rehearse the songs from the Singing Workshop, and a waiata and haka.  

Through continuous assessment, the Directors, CEO and recommendations from others with whom the students interact during the week, will select twenty-four of the students to form SGCNZ Young Shakespeare Company 2020. They will travel to the Globe in London and Stratford-Upon-Avon in July next year for workshops, tours, talks, various Shakespeare related experiences and are rehearsed in an hour of a play, which is performed on the Globe stage. Next year, there will also be a group of SGCNZ Teachers Go Global doing their own course at the same time, though sharing the stage time from 11.15pm – 1am for the invited audience performance at the end of their time at the Globe. 

Over half of the 500 students who have gone to the Globe as members of SGCNZ YSC have subsequently been employed in various facets of the arts. Others have applied the transferable skills they learn to whatever careers they choose.

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