In-person Specialized Workshops
programme Dates
January 3 to 29, 2023
Arrival: Monday, January 2 Departure: Monday, January 30
Tuition Fees
$4,875 USD
Early payment discount: Pay the full tuition by October 15 and save $600.
The Center for Actor Training typically offers a variety of specialized workshops throughout the year exploring a full range of disciplines including rhetoric, wit, clown, fight, voice, movement, public speaking, and more. Go here for more details on our online programming.
Shakespeare Scene Study: Text into Action
This six-week Shakespeare scene study class offers a physical, active approach to working the text. Actors will engage in detailed scene work supported by exercises designed to build spontaneity, freedom, and a strong connection between action and language. Classes include guided warm-ups and exercises drawn from Alexander Technique, Lecoq-based physical work, embodied structure of the verse, and presence practices. Attention will be given to personal connection and clarity of thought through individual coaching.
All scenes will be drawn from two Shakespeare plays, allowing actors to deepen character work and understanding of given circumstances over time.
Open to all levels, with some prior experience in Shakespeare recommended.
DATES: March 3 to April 14, 2026 (no class on April 7)
SCHEDULE: Tuesdays, 7pm to 10pm
LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY (DUMBO area)
FACULTY: Sheila Bandyopadhyay
TUITION: $400 USD**
BIPOC ARTIST and STUDENT TUITION: $325
**Alumni (15%) and union (10%) discounts available. Email training@shakespeare.org for details.
Unboundaried Voice – from Laughter to Lament
Join Marya Lowry for an exuberant exploration of your Unboundaried Voice.
Deepen your connection to your Self, your passions, and your ability to express them artfully through your journey from Laughter to Lament.
Lamentation encompasses an expansive variety of physical and vocal expressions, including grief, complaint, rage, sorrow songs, styles of Irish and Scotting keening, Finnish crying songs, Blues songs, lulliments, and communal and solo expressions of them all.
In our private lives or in our art forms, we often search in vain for the forms and freedom to give voice to the full heights and depths of our lived experience. Unboundaried Voice invites you to discover your personal voice of exultation, praise, and joy; of protest, resistance, and challenge; of yearning, sorrow, and grief; of devotion, hope and healing discovered and shared in a welcoming community.
Grounded in solid vocal technique and supported by the “extended” vocal practice of the Roy Hart Voice Centre, Unboundaried Voice explores the deep humanity and rich expressiveness of ecstatic voice and ritual lamentation practices. We will celebrate the vast array of emotional and vocal colors expressed in lamentation practices around the globe and provide ways for the participant to deepen personal connections to themselves, their passions, and the ability to express them freely and artfully. In this workshop we will explore its application to text and performance. I will provide text samples but please be free to bring something of your own to explore.
Our process
- Shed our workday bodies with streams of laughter, soft breaths, hoots and howls, groans and shrieks, and sultry yawns and soft sighs to gentle the autonomic nervous system
- Connect breath and voice to a physically grounded, imaginatively connected body
- Rediscover the joys of socially silenced sounds within the context of improvisations
- Reimagine your voice both as a literal and metaphorical instrument of self-expression and empowerment
- Integrate styles of vocal production employed in non-western cultures
- Sound together in an atmosphere of curiosity and play
- Learn how to recenter your body and emotions after a strong emotional experience
- Application to various text resources
Who is it for?
Actors, singers, professional voice users wanting to expand their vocal vocabulary
Those engaged in therapeutic work
Voice, acting teacher and directors
Anyone eager to expand their vocal expressiveness
Those curious about the power and beauty of lamentation and grief expressions
All are welcome. Participants should be 18+
DATES: May 14 to 17, 2026
SCHEDULE: 10am to 5:30pm each day
LOCATION: Shakespeare & Company campus, Lenox, Mass.
FACILITATOR: Marya Lowry
TUITION: $425 USD**
BIPOC ARTIST and STUDENT TUITION: $350
**Alumni (15%) and union (10%) discounts available. Email training@shakespeare.org for details.
HOUSING: A limited amount of on-campus housing is available for an additional $65/night. First come, first-serve. Housing is private bedroom with shared bathrooms, kitchen, and common areas.
Marya Lowry is a Boston-based actor and voice trainer. With over four decades teaching and acting professionally, Marya has taught actors, singers, teachers, on-air journalists and public speakers in France, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Switzerland, as well as in the UK, Canada and the U.S.
Marya’s teaching practice highlights an approach to voice that is deeply influenced by France-based Roy Hart Voice Centre’s extended vocal range methodologies and non-western vocal practices applied to traditional Anglo-American voice training. Based in solid research of vocal lamentation and keening practices around the globe, she pioneered its inclusion into theater voice training and is the creator of “Unboundaried Voice – from Laughter to Lament” for theater research, performance, and personal or professional use.
Marya creates a positive environment where everyone is seen, heard and respected. She fashions a festive space for personal research and growth, where surprises, delights and deep joy can emerge within the community.
An award-winning actor, her theater performances include classics, experimental, original creative works, in addition to narration for the Boston Pops, Handel & Hayden Society, New England Conservatory and the Mary Baker Eddy Library. She is a founding member/resident actor with Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Professor Emerita at Brandeis University, and a certified Roy Hart Centre Voice Teacher. Vocal Coaching for theatre includes Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Shakespeare Festivals around the country. She toured Bulgaria with DIVI ZHENI singing traditional Bulgarian music at festivals throughout the country. Marya is a mentor to incarcerated women since 2002
Clowning For Actors
Led by Shakespeare & Company master clown teacher and faculty member Micheal F. Toomey, this workshop explores the transformative world of Clown and blends physical theater, improvisation, and the authentic self to help actors rediscover their Clown and deepen their capacity for connection, presence, and play.
Across cultures, the Clown has served as a mischief-maker and a mirror. They reveal what is most human in all of us—and ask us to laugh at it. In this three-day experience, actors will discover what is most human, most vulnerable, and most ridiculous about themselves—and invite the audience to laugh.
All levels of experience and ability are encouraged to participate.
DATES: POSTPONED, New dates to be announced
LOCATION: Shakespeare & Company campus, Lenox, Mass.
FACULTY: Michael F. Toomey
TUITION:$395; alumni (15%) and union (10%) discounts are available.
BIPOC ARTIST and STUDENT TUITION: $345
PLEASE NOTE: For all in-person workshops, all participants and workshop staff are encouraged to have completed a COVID-19 vaccine regimen. For all programs held on the Shakespeare & Company campus in Lenox, Mass., this includes being up to date on the most recent COVID-19 vaccine dose(s) for which one is eligible.
Course Gallery
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You will study...
.01 Linklater Voice
The full progression of Kristin Linklater’s approach to voice training for actors is taught during the four weeks by Designated Linklater voice teachers. In addition to daily classes in Linklater, voice teachers regularly join in text classes and offer specialized classes to help participants integrate the voice work into their scenes.
.02 Movement
The movement progression includes Pure Movement (Swings), Alexander Technique, physical expressivity, and dance. Participants will be guided through exercises to promote awareness of (and release from) habitual body tension, sensitivity to impulse, dynamic physical presence and stamina, delight in moving with passion and precision, and ensemble.
.03 Text Work
Basics introduces the actor to a text approach which demands an open and personal commitment to thought, word, and gesture. Basics evolves into scene work, first through Dropping In (an approach to experiencing the text on a word-by-word basis) and into text analysis and detailed scene work. Classes in Sonnet and Structure of the Verse round out the text progression, allowing actors to merge their personal connection with the form of Shakespeare’s language.
.04 Actor/Audience Relationship
The participant is invited to explore the Elizabethan world of Actor/Audience Relationship—a theatrical reality without a fourth wall, in which the immediate energy of the audience fuels the actor to reveal a deeper level of truth and experience, which in turns enkindles the audience’s ability to receive Shakespeare’s language.
.05 Clown & Stage Fight
The participant is invited to explore the Elizabethan world of Actor/Audience Relationship—a theatrical reality without a fourth wall, in which the immediate energy of the audience fuels the actor to reveal a deeper level of truth and experience, which in turns enkindles the audience’s ability to receive Shakespeare’s language.
Tuition
A limited number of scholarships are available for People of the Global Majority/BIPOC artists from the Dennis Krausnick Fellowship Fund. Contact us for more information.
You will learn:
- A deeper connection of the body and voice when acting on stage
- Confidence to be fully present on stage when speaking Shakespeare's language
- An understanding of the forms and structures that support the actor’s emotional, visceral and cognitive imagination
- The skills necessary to authentically deliver Shakespeare’s language with accuracy, specificity, and clarity of thought
- A renewed trust in yourself as a theatre artist
