Fri 25 Jul 2008
The beginning. 21 young, enthusiastic Shakespeare lovers left New Zealand on July 4th. We arrived in London bright and early on Sunday morning.
First thing on the agenda was a tour of London. Although very early in the morning, and rather tired and looking worse for wear, this was a great introduction to London. We saw St Pauls, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, London Eye, Westminster, Buckingham Palace within 4hours.
Due to complications with the check-in time to the hostel, we had the afternoon to look around Southwark. We were walking down a street when someone said “oh look, that’s the Globe”. I was a little confused, because all I can see was a brick building. As we rounded the corner a round, white building came into sight. There really are no words to describe what it was like to be 50m away from a building that I have been learning about all during high school. A combination of utter excitement, bewilderment and the intimidating sense of history resulted in a goofy smile and several moments of staring.
OK, our first day at Shakespeare’s Globe was pretty full on. First up was a movement class with Glyn Macdonald. She is incredible. We all discussed what we wanted to work on with our movement and bodies. Glyn put it very nicely – our bodies are instruments and Glyn is there to help us tune our instruments. We did several exercises that engaged both sides of the brain and body. One other exercise that we did was galloping. Galloping is a physical way of demonstrating the rhythm that much of Shakespeare’s verse is written in, iambic pentameter. It was a really good way to connect the text and the rhythm, using the galloping meant it was connected through the body memory.
After Glyn’s workshop we met with our director Colin Hurley. He is a seasoned Globe actor and is a lovely character. After all the introductions, Colin took us for a tour around the Globe. It was pretty amazing, it takes a while to get used to being in a rounded theatre, all the different galleries have different views – a very special place to work in.
