12th Night Online

In February 2018, the Tampere and Coventry team collaborated with the Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts, Helsinki and students from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden on a week long course exploring the text of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’. Twenty students from Coventry participated with six from the University of the Arts and two from Gothenburg and the week was followed up with a visit from Coventry students to both Tampere and Helsinki to participate in classes, workshops and cultural activities.

The text was chosen as it offers a variety of staging challenges for working in the telepresence space. As comedy depends on timing and this play has many ‘farcical’ elements such as the famous ‘Box Tree’ scene, the team wished to explore how these scenes could be developed using this technology. There was a mix of workshops from guest lecturers from Tampere, Helsinki and Coventry covering voice, movement, theatre games as well as Adobe Connect sessions on the play, Renaissance theatre history and styles and English pronunciation classes.