Shakespeare as a vehicle for empathy and diagnostic skills training in undergraduate medical students in their psychiatry posting

Psychiatry undergraduate training has been significantly curtailed by the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examines the use of Shakespeare's Hamlet, especially via the characters of Hamlet and Ophelia, to impart two core skills in psychiatry, namely diagnostic abilities and empathy. Medical students undergoing the psychiatry posting watched Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet online, focusing on identifying psychopathology, forming diagnoses, identifying countertransferences, and developing empathy through acting out close passages. Students were able to identify the features of bipolar disorder in Hamlet, correlating his behavior with separate depressive and manic episodes. They were also able to appreciate the unique quality of dissociation in Ophelia, especially in Act 4 of Hamlet, and recognize it as a manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder. Through acting out closed passages, students were also able to feel empathy by putting themselves into the shoes of Hamlet and Ophelia. Such a pedagogical approach has additional unexpected utility in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly curtailed face-to-face medical education, leading to alternative online methods such as movies and Shakespearean plays in psychiatry education. In conclusion, though online methods cannot fully supplant face-to-face patient contact, they can be crucial tools in times of necessity and allow students to engage in interdisciplinary education, marrying the arts and the humanities.

Using Shakespeare to Address Societal Problems

Stephens uses Shakespeare to address societal problems. Teaching William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet's relevance to struggling readers is challenging. Like Kelly Gallagher's argument that struggling writers do not do enough writing, she thinks struggling readers suffer from similar failures: teachers do not do enough reading with students. Like Gallagher, she believes it is best to focus on what teachers can control. So, when she was required to teach Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to her ninth graders last year, she paused to reflect on undertaking this task with struggling readers while making the text accessible and meaningful. Here she describes her attempt to meet this task.

Jitney by August Wilson, and: Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (review)

See PDF ] Jitney, part of Wilson's American Century Cycle exploring African American life in each decade of the twentieth century, directly explores notions of community through its depiction of a group of jitney drivers, men who use their own vehicles to provide rides to those in need of them. While it initially seemed incongruous to see Jitney with its realistic interior setting in an outdoor performance venue, the sense of strangeness faded quickly as the production began. [...]performing outside a conventional theatre space made the production viable in a city in which the Delta variant precipitated a rapid rise in COVID-19 cases during its run. During the exorcism scene, for instance, Sir Toby drenched Malvolio with liquid sprayed from a large plastic container labeled "Holy Water," and Feste performed a toe-tapping number, "Devil Be Gone," backed by an enthusiastic red-robed gospel choir.

Knowing What we are Making: Props, Scholarship, and the Pandemic

This article is mindful of two separate phenomena: that recent years have seen a plethora of methodologically diverse and rewardingly curious works on theatre props, and that the Covid-19 pandemic halted in-person dramatic performance in the UK to a greater extent and for a longer duration than at any time since 1660. Accordingly, this essay offers four broad headings for enquiry, situating theatrical props in their longer past as well as theatre and archival conditions as we recently knew them: definitions, racialised props, methodologies, and futures. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Journeying to the Underworld: Ghosts and Grief in Autobiographical Writing

Still in the midst of the COVID- 19 pandemic, many had spent months flip-flopping between inperson and online classes since Mar 2020. Schaufele felt that their learning had become stale, claustrophobic, and strained, forced as they were to communicate through pixel and sound. To complicate matters, their students and staff had suffered a difficult and personal loss during the intervening summer months. Several of his students were still very much grieving the death of a fellow student. Now, as they were back together in person for the 2021-22 academic year, a palpable feeling of loss pervaded their classroom and school community. Because grief and its associated losses had emerged so strongly during this semester (and throughout the pandemic more generally), he sought to open up a space where they might explore and "shar[e] emotions surrounding grief in ethical ways". The experience of grief can be profoundly personal and uniquely connected to a person's memories.

Sounding the Polyphonic Cacophony of Macbeth with a Young Jozi Ensemble

Digital theatre-making initiatives that had emerged during Covid-19 lockdowns urged an interrogation of the languages of live theatre when, in South Africa, as the public arena reopened and social interaction resumed, reconfigured notions of theatre-making seemed apt. Reformulating and reimagining the operations of the medium, and the processes through which stage productions evolve, not only applied aspects of successful digital theatre but also aligned with the ideological imperatives of decolonisation. The Joburg Theatre Youth Development Programme production of Macbeth (2021) offered an opportunity to explore soundscape through the interplay of spoken word and non-semantic avian and animal calls. As a point of entry to staging the play, ensemble-based improvisation around developing a soundscape led to a more considered mapping of ornithological images, their connotations and theatrical efficacy. Extended play in generating birdcalls was instrumental in building performers' confidence in transposition and spontaneous translation from English to vernacular languages to give this rendition of Macbeth an edgy, contemporary, local tone. This article documents and addresses the rehearsal processes and some outcomes of the approach that was adopted.

DO AMOR E OUTRAS MORTES: RELENDO ROMEU E JULIETA EM TEMPOS DE PANDEMIA

O artigo propoe uma releitura a luz da pandemia da covid-19 da peça Romeu e Julieta, de William Shakespeare, escrita entre 1591 e 1595. Contextualiza-se a peça a partir da bibliografia que historiciza os impactos da pandemia da peste bubônica no século XVI, destacando a nascente política sanitaria que recomendava restrições de circulaçao, com controle do Estado, e os impactos que ela causou na vida social, económica e política. A partir disso, sustenta-se a ideia de que a peça pode ser lida como uma crítica social cínica.Alternate :The article proposes a reinterpretation in the light of the covid-19 pandemic of the play Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, written between 1591 and 1595. The piece is contextualized from the bibliography that historicizes the impacts of the bubonic plague pandemic in the 16 th century, highlighting the nascent health policy that recommended circulation restrictions, with State control, and the impacts it caused on social, economic and political aspects of human life. The article sustains the idea that the play can be read as a cynical social criticism is supported.

Following Puck virtually in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream experiment: Live theatre and high-tech innovations

The thirty-minute experiment titled Dream represented a collaborative effort between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Audience of the Future. It fused live performance with motion capture technology, 3D graphics, and interactive gaming techniques, and let the audience remotely guide Puck through a virtual forest. Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, it focused on Puck and the fairies. If, for online audiences, the virtual fairies moving through a digital forest suggested a video game, the eight performances were delivered live and in real time. This Dream represents a new format for Shakespeare’s performance that evolved during (rather than emerged from) the COVID-19 pandemic. © The Author(s) 2022.

Reflections on Online Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Vignettes from an Indian Classroom

[...]more often than not, teachers had little or no means of accessing the visual cues of students' reactions and modulating the tone of the discussion accordingly. Despite my personal dislike for many aspects of the film, I believed it would serve as a useful point of discussion about issues such as the appropriateness of the timing of the film's release, the film's conceptions of feminism as a rabid movement of mob-justice, and issues concerning sexual harassment. Some argued that the casting couch was to blame, and yet others mentioned in their essays that it was unfortunate that justice was not always served, but that the law was all we had.

The Virtual Tempest, Digital Caliban and Robotic Ariel in the Trans-Created Toufann: A Mauritian Fantasy by Dev Virahsawmy

Shakespeare has always been the source of inspiration to the generations all over the world stage. Toufann by Dev Virahsawmy is one such piece of clone. The world has taken a drastic turn in the 21st century. Digitalisation is the only normal in abnormality of the millennials with the upsurge of 'technology' as the 'spear' of Shakespeare and 'network' a 'villain' as Prospero creating 'magic' and 'illusion' in our lives. 'Virtual' has become 'real' and real has taken a backseat in the heaven called 'home'. In this techno-savvy, digital, virtual world;it is imperative for the 'Humanities' to adapt the new normal. Toufann is one such child of this techno-renaissance playwright Dev Virahsawmy, a Mauritian playwright creating a 'tempest' by virtual slides on computer.Caliban is no more looked as black, beast, filthy or low born;he is a smart, handsome, creative, technical man with a heart already lost to Cupid's bow. Miranda is a feminist;reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex pregnant with Kalibann's child. Ariel is a Robot;now emotionless, mechanical and artificial. Ferdinand is infertile, fickle minded and wants the companionship of Robot Ariel. The present paper will discuss the techno aspect of the play in detail with the tinge of focus on the turns of events in the neo-millennials.

Theatre of Empowerment

This article is an updated assessment of ‘The Shakespeare Prison Project’ (SPP, Wisconsin), informed in part by post-COVID-19 reflections. Founder and artistic director Jonathan Shailor provides an exploration of the theory and practice that informs his work, which he calls the Theatre of Empowerment: storytelling, dialogue and performance, in the service of personal and social evolution. The key to understanding this work is seeing the prison theatre ensemble as a ‘commu-nity of practice’ that cultivates the virtues of individual empowerment, rela-tional responsibility and moral imagination. The author tests these claims with a preliminary analysis of participants’ stories and draws conclusions from this analysis that will inform the next chapter of ‘The Shakespeare Prison Project’: Shakespeare’s Mirror, an approach that connects themes from Shakespeare’s plays with the personal narratives of incarcerated actors. © 2022 Intellect Ltd Article. English language.

Hamlet 2021's Outrageous Fortune

Load shedding (power cuts) in our corner of Pretoria coincided with the performance, so the laptop had to run on its own steam while internet access was channelled through a smartphone hotspot (the signal of which had proved unstable in the past but on this occasion held up bravely). Plans for Hamlet at The Fugard were then already under way;the play text became a frequent point of reference during the workshop sessions, and the three-day event closed with a roundtable discussion on the Fugards proposed production. In the blurb beneath the video link, Coppen paid homage to the support that the project received from Fugard Artistic Director Greg Karvellas and his team, as well as to the theatre's founder and benefactor, Eric Abraham. The online experience is defined by the physical separation of audience members and actors: the performance takes place in a makeshift, inbetween virtual world of its own.