Rather controversially
May 16, 2012
Rather controversially, The Shakespeare Young Company (SYC) have decided that instead of performing The Bard's work for this season's Dell, we will look at the writing of another great storyteller; Chaucer. The thinking behind this is that we couldn't think of a better way to embrace Shakespeare's work than by exploring the tales that he himself was inspired by. We also see massive potential in fitting the famous Canterbury Tales into an outdoor setting.
Our initial rehearsal explored the idea of vocal storytelling by making up tales off the top of our head. Naturally we covered topics such as Meerkats, Warwick Davis, comas, Icarus, bears Vs lions and whipped cream, but the idea was that the essential elements were there; love, conflict, excitement, and drama. Just like in Chaucer's, and indeed Shakespeare's, work.
From there we started looking at a variation of Tales. To date, we have looked at The Nun's Priest's Tale, a story about cocks, hens, foxes and farmers' wives which was put to a group of teenagers and then immediately decided it simply must be performed as a Carry On parody. Almost too easy.
The Pardoner's Tale and The Franklyn's tale are other snippets we have looked at and are currently working on different styles and techniques to bring these fantastic stories to life on stage, We want our final product to be a vibrant mix of music, choreography and modern improvisation merged with Chaucer's language. As you can see from the pictures; we're having fun making it so can only hope it's fun to watch!
by Isabella James
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