The workshop will be led by Alessandro Fabrizi, Italian director and teacher; and Susan Main, designated Linklater voice teacher.

A select international group of professional and student actors will be led in a workshop exploring Shakespeare’s classic play and Mehndelssohn's Overture A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the story "Pyramus and Thisbe" from Ovid’s Metamorphosis (translated by the poet Ted Hughes in the book, Tales from Ovid), and Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare.

The workshop will appropriately be conducted on the Island of Stromboli, as close as we can get to Ovid’s original setting.  Daily classes will include advanced Linklater voice work along with “Movement and Text Technique” created by Alessandro Fabrizi.  The workshop process will culminate in a series of site-specific performances at different locations on the island of Stromboli and a final public presentation at the Anfiteatro Eos in Stromboli, an outdoor amphitheatre whose backdrop is the Mediterranean Sea.

Stromboli, an island formed by an active volcano, offers an inspiring set for this exploration: the voices and the stories will resonate in an environment of fire, water, wind, black sand, and rocks.  The constantly changing landscape and seascape there evoke elemental metamorphoses.  The actors’ gestures and voices will respond to and be enhanced by the stimuli of the environment, the voice and movement techniques studied during the workshop sessions, and the images conjured up by the stories.  All this will occur under the eye of the theatre director, who will absorb, reflect on, and give shape to what has stirred.

The workshop will investigate the purpose and potential of language and the human voice; it will consider how communication transpires at the deepest levels of being; and it will reflect on the experience of enlightenment that can still take place in the theatrical interaction between actors and audience.

Metamorphosis, elemental transformation, communication….  Isn’t that the actor’s calling?