‘Whose stories get told? Reading – Righting – Responding’: Adjoa Andoh leads first workshop

Actor, director, producer, and Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre Adjoa Andoh was joined by award winning Royal Shakespeare Company actor Simon Trinder to lead the first workshop in the series ‘Whose stories get told? Reading – Righting – Responding’ on Saturday, 23 January.

Simon began the day by giving a crash-course in Shakespearean theory as both readers and performers, teaching participants how to parse verse and prose and to learn the different emotional impact of both. These, and other acting tools, were put into practice with Sonnet 116.

Adjoa followed with further acting exercises—including an impressively scaled round of the name game—before delving into a study of the Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene III. Students stepped into the words of Shylock, Bassanio, and Antonio, using the tools Simon and Adjoa had given them as an exercise of identity and language.

The workshop was followed by a question-and-answer session with Simon and Dr Samantha Ege, Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and previous Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, Oxford. Dr Ege discussed her ground-breaking research on the African American composer Florence B. Price and her journey through academia and the classical music world through the lens of various identities.

The next workshops in the series will be held on 21 May and 11 June.

Find out more about the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre.