Catherine Harvey – Poetry and Performance - Reimagining the Classics

Everywhere we go these days we seem to hear poetry – on TV, radio and the stage – even on ads and social media.
This workshop helps actors to find the clues left by writers – using language, sound, imagery and form to bring verse texts to life. Skills that are useful when working with any verse text – whether it’s a poem or a play by Shakespeare. And skills that can be employed when tackling any text, whether in an audition, in rehearsal or in performance.

In this workshop we’ll explore re-imaginings by modern poets of classic poems and tales, looking at
their contemporary resonance, and trying out a range of techniques that can be used when working
on other classic and poetic texts – and beyond.

Please bring along a poem (or extract from a poem) that you’d like to work on that is a translation or re-imagining of a classic text by a modern poet (with another in reserve in case we have time to look at more).
There are many wonderful writers to choose from, such Simon Armitage (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, The Death of King Arthur, The Owl and the Nightingale); Ted Hughes (Tales from Ovid); Seamus Heaney (Beowulf, Virgil’s Aeneid, and old Irish works such as Sweeney Astray); Bernard O’Donoghue (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight); Carol Ann Duffy (The World’s Wife); as well as Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell and Ciaran Carson. Though you may have favourites of your own.

Catherine Harvey is an award-winning actor, writer, director and broadcaster. A passionate promoter of poetry and verse speaking, she was creator and series producer of Tongue and Talk: the Dialect Poets, which ran for 5 years on Radio 4 – frequently featuring on Pick of the Week and Daljit Nagra’s Poetry Extra – and has worked extensively as an actor on programmes such as Radio 4’s Poetry Please, and Radio 3’s Words and Music, Night Waves and The Verb. Catherine has taught at many of the UK’s top drama schools and is a visiting professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Niagara. She is Artistic Director of the poetry performance group Rhyme & Reason, and a Senior Producer at Roguegunners Productions, whose recent work includes co-productions with the Finborough Theatre – An Earls Court Miscellany (nominated for an Off West End Award) and Remember Your Lovers - The Poetry of Sidney Keyes, featuring Claire Bloom.