SF Shakespeare Festival

Bay Area Shakespeare Camps

Our Virtual Shakespeare Camps provided a mixture of live online instruction and offline projects for a fun and flexible Shakespeare Camp experience! Campers enrolled in Shakespeare Players Camp (7-12-year-olds) or Upstart Crows Camp (13-18-year-olds) enjoyed tailored and carefully crafted programs to move their bodies, challenge their minds, and ignite their imaginations. As always, camps end with a performance on the final day - using the magic of virtual theatre.

We created a new updated schedule that will make Virtual Shakespeare Camp even better than last year! Along with input from our experienced Teaching Artists, we incorporated helpful parent feedback to make the best use of the virtual format. We adjusted the hours of the year’s virtual camps to include fewer synchronous Zoom class hours per day, more independent projects, more individual attention, longer breaks and more flexibility. Recognizing that the final performance of a full Shakespeare play is an important part of the experience, we extended our virtual camps to 3 weeks in order to allow for enough virtual rehearsal time. Campers will have plenty of time to explore acting and movement techniques, Shakespeare’s language, and set and costume design in a way that allows maximum fun, time off-screen, and the sense of ownership of the play that actors are able to develop over a longer rehearsal period.

SF Shakes’ educational values center social-emotional development, community-building, and better understanding of our shared humanity. The focus of our education programs is less on training actors, more on encouraging self-expression, ownership, and interrogation of classical texts. As we continue to navigate the pandemic, for summer of 2021 we chose to explore plays with themes of loss and reconciliation, travel, and reunion with loved ones - Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Twelfth Night.

Our price is $750 for the three weeks of instruction: only $50/day. (Scholarship assistance is available for those with financial need.)

Want more information about why your kids will have more fun than they ever imagined at Shakespeare Camp? Check out text and video commentary by teaching artist Amy Lizardo on our blog post!

Virtual Camps include:
- Camp Kit including materials for the session
- Daily interactive, synchronous Zoom classes with our teaching artists
- Pre-recorded asynchronous videos for additional enrichment (craft activities for Players, further language and theme exploration for Upstart Crows)

See our FAQ page for additional information. Please contact us (email or 415-558-0888) if you have questions about Shakespeare Camps or any of our programs.

Shakespeare Players (7-12 years old, rising 2nd-7th graders) Summer 2021:
June 7 - June 25 (M-F)
June 28 - July 16 (M-F)
July 19 - Aug 6 (M-F)

A sample camp day for 7-12-year-olds could look like this:
9-9:30 am - Individual and small-group time with teaching artist (by appointment, on Zoom)
9:30-10:15 am - Warm-up, voice, and movement (on Zoom)
10:15-10:30 am - Snack break
10:30-11:30 am - Shakespeare acting class or rehearsal (on Zoom)
11:30 am-12 pm - Rehearsal (on Zoom)
12 pm - Lunch break
Afternoon any time - Asynchronous craft activity, Shakespeare videos, learn lines, etc - these optional enrichment activities are designed to take about 1-2 hours to do.

The Plays:

The Adventures of Pericles (7-8 year olds)
Based on the second act of Pericles, this short play follows our hero as he washes up on the shore of Pentapolis as a refugee from a shipwreck - and is rescued by a friendly group of local fishermen. He competes in a jousting tournament, wins the heart of a princess, and befriends a king… a wonderful fairy tale story for our youngest campers, with lots of opportunities for movement, costume and prop-making, and comedy.

Twelfth Night (9-12 year olds) This classic comedy about the many forms and fashions of love, Twelfth Night cushions relevant content, such as loss and bullying, in an uproarious farce featuring love triangles, hidden identities, and mischievous clowns. With a wide range of roles for actors at any level of experience, Twelfth Night invites us into a world where the improbable is possible, chaos begets connection, and love transcends shipwrecks. 

 
Upstart Crows (13-18 year olds, rising 8th-12th graders) Summer 2021
Session 1: June 7 - June 25 (M-F)
Session 2: June 28 - July 16 (M-F)

Session 3: no longer accepting enrollments (Sign up to receive updates about Fall Shakespeare Saturday sessions)

Our Upstart Crows teaching artists recognize that teens can handle a longer day on Zoom but are also at their best later in the morning.
Our sample schedule for 13-18-year-olds looks like this:
10-10:50 am - Warm-up, Voice & Movement
10:50-11 am - Break
11 am -12 pm - Acting Shakespeare (on Zoom)
12-1 pm - Lunch break
1-3 pm - Monologue work and rehearsal (with 10-minute break)

Crows also benefit from visiting guest instructors and asynchronous videos to further challenge and enhance their experience.

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