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CALIFORNIA SHAKESPEARE THEATER
Hamlet: Blood in the Brain
Project Update
July 2005
Hamlet: Blood in the Brain is the is the first major commission
of our New Works/New Communities initiative to bring disparate
communities together to participate directly in the creation
of new works of theater inspired by classic literature. This
project is a collaborative effort to develop a new work of
theater with playwright Naomi lizuka and San Francisco-based
Intersection for the Arts + Campo Santo. Although we are
only mid-way through the project, we have made great progress
and realized a number of important community outreach outcomes.
In concert with Campo Santo, we have been working with Ms.
lizuka and community partners since last summer to gather
stories, develop characters, and re-imagine Hamlet’s
world as deeply rooted in the poetry, language, traditions
and myths of modern day Oakland. Two specific avenues Ms.
Iizuka has been exploring — through interviews, writing
workshops, and performance events are the experience of incarcerated
populations, and the rhythms, language and movement of hip
hop. In the process, we have brought together underserved
and under-represented communities in Oakland and beyond through
the enduring poetry of Shakespeare. We are also finding and
articulating the poetry in the words and the stories of contemporary
Oakland through the voices of Oakland teens, the sermons
of Oakland pastors, the real life stories of former drug
lords, and the memories the men and women who call Oakland
home.
This research has been done during four residencies (August
and October 2004, and February and May 2005) in collaboration
with staff and artists from both theaters, along with key
community liaisons. Our specific activities have included
the following:
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• Community Conversations
— In August 2004, we hosted our first significant
opportunity to
engage the community as participants in the play’s
development. The panel discussion took place in downtown
Oakland, and the multi-generational audience of nearly
100 people included Oakland youth and grandparents,
political leaders and community activists, and representatives
and program participants of community-based organizations
such as SISTER, Education Not Incarceration, Coalition
for West Oakland Revitalization, and the Global Education
Project.
• Performance Events
— In February 2005, we hosted
Oakland Beat, a spoken word performance event that
featured 22 young writers, including those from previous
workshops, Laney College, and others we are reaching
through community-based organizations like LoveLife
Foundation, The Beat Within, WritersCorps and Colored
Ink.
• Interviews
— One-on-one interviews have connected
Ms. lizuka to a broad range of knowledge and experience.
Interviewees include Shakespearean scholars, such as
Philippa Kelly who has taught works of Shakespeare
to incarcerated populations, and Oakland community
leaders working to reduce gun violence. Ms. lizuka
also met with 45 participants in manalive (‘men
allied nationally against living in violent environments”),
a therapeutic program for violent men, and spoke at
length with a former drug dealer. Most recently, Ms.
Iizuka spent four hours talking with Lawrence “Red” Walker,
a powerful and charismatic former drug lord now operating
several legitimate businesses in Oakland, and interviewed
Malvina Stephens, who directs the prison ministry for
Allen Temple Baptist Church, a large black church and
community center serving 5,000 members in East Oakland.
• Writing Workshops
— Interactive writing
relationships have been invaluable to shaping the play’s
research process, engaging mostly youth participants
in both Hamlet’s story and creative explorations
of their own stories in relation to themes in Shakespeare’s
play. Ms. Iizuka has led workshops with program participants
from Colored Ink and the LoveLife Foundation, high
school students at the Samaritan Neighborhood Center
at the First Baptist Church of Oakland, incarcerated
youth in the “Write to Read” Program at
Alameda County Juvenile Hall in San Leandro, and students
at Del Amigo, a continuation high school in San Ramon.
• New Audiences
— We have also worked to introduce
community participants to the work of each theater,
and have hosted youth from the LoveLife Foundation
at Cal Shakes performances of The Comedy of Errors
and Henry /V, Parts One and Two during our 2004 season,
This year, staff also brought Del Amigo students to
the March 8~ Hybrid Project at Intersection for the
Arts, one of whom may participate on scholarship in
the two-week Cal Shakes Summer Theater Camp. |
We had originally commissioned this project in 2004 because
it represented a rare opportunity for Cal Shakes to partner
with Campo Santo, a distinctly different theater than ours,
and to work for an extended period of time with Naomi lizuka,
one of our country’s most gifted playwrights, to make
an original piece that involves community members from conception
to production. As indicated in earlier updates, however,
our development of Hamlet: Blood in the Brain has evolved
far beyond these planned activities and our high hopes. Led
by Ms. lizuka’s curiosity and commitment to the integrity
of the work, she has transformed the playwriting process
by embracing three Oakland artists as her co-writers on the
project. As a result, this project has grown into a uniquely
powerful vehicle for supporting the growth of East Bay artists
as important creative voices in their community.
In the course of Ms. lizuka’s first two residencies
in 2004, she decided to collaborate with three talented Oakland
artists - two writers and actors in their early twenties,
Ricky Marshall and Ryan Peters, and Campo Santo member Sean
San José. She has invited them to be artistic partners
on the project by co-authoring the play with her, helping
to assure the integrity of the play’s depiction of
Oakland’s people and complex history. During each of
Ms. lizuka’s residencies, her fellow writers have increased
their involvement in research for the play through interviews,
writing workshops, and our performance event in February.
In the process, these Oakland artists are emerging as vital
links to their community, and role models for Oakland and
other youth drawn into the work through workshops and spoken
word performances.
As a professional team of writers, the four artists draw
upon each other to shape the play, integrating their research
to conceive each scene, and define each character. Their
writing sessions are fully collaborative undertakings, where
together they plant seeds, shape and test language, discover
tension, movement, and resolution. Ms. lizuka works as an
experienced guide for the playwriting process, but her co-authors
are equal partners in creating the play. This new dimension
of our project, founded on a brave and generous invitation
by Ms. lizuka, is integral to the vision of our two theaters
to redefine the process for creating new work, and reveals
the power of art to enlarge our sense of what is possible — individually
and collectively. Ms. lizuka’s co-authors have become
essential to the project and they are flourishing as artists
in the course of their combined endeavor.
Through our experience with this project, New Works/New
Communities has grown into something
so meaningful to our company, and so essential to our being,
that we consider it the most significant
advancement that Cal Shakes has made under the leadership
of Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone. The initiative continues
to grow, defining itself with each residency, each new commission,
and the myriad activities within them, connecting us to people
and organizations new to us and, often, new to theater itself.
Additionally,
Cal Shakes is building on linkages between this project and
our Artistic Learning programs; for example,
we provided an artist residency focused on Shakespeare’s
Hamlet to continuation high school students at Del Amigo
High prior to project artists visiting in February, Ms. Ryan
and Mr. Marshall will also be guest artists for future artist
residencies at their alma mater, Skyline High School. New
project partnerships include one with Youth Speaks, which
has an existing relationship with Intersection for the Arts.
This grew out of Ms. Iizuka’s recognition of how wordplay
in the spoken word movement — particularly in “freestyle” sessions — is
similar to the prevalence of wordplay in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet We are planning a writing group moderated by Oakland
poet Ise Lyfe, in which Youth Speaks participants will write
a parallel version of Hamlet in the style of spoken word
poetry, and perform it at Intersection’s Hybrid Project
in the fall.
This month, project artists are participating in New Voices/New
Visions, an annual theater lab established by Ms. lizuka
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she
is a Professor of Dramatic Arts. This two-week workshop will
allow the project’s artists to develop the piece further,
working with additional artists and scholars from multiple
disciplines (e.g. urban studies, psychology), along with
UCSB students and local community members. In the fall, Cal
Shakes will host an informal reading of the work in progress
to allow staff and artists of both theaters to explore the
world of the play as it emerged from that workshop.
Our revised timeline for 2006 includes a five-day workshop
in March at Cal Shakes (Berkeley), resulting in a staged
reading of the play in Oakland. The play’s world premiere
at Intersection for the Arts will be in October 2006, directed
by Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone and including
actors from both theaters.
Thank you for your support of this
project!
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