From 17 to 26 January 2017, the Teatrul Municipal Tony Bulandra, Targoviste, hosted Masks of Shylock, a workshop held by the theatre company Pantakin. The event continued and completed the work begun by Pantakin at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in November 2016, in the workshop entitled Shylock after Shylock – Shakespeare’s Masks.

The Romanian workshop was another stage in the large three-year project entitled Shakespeare in and beyond the Ghetto: staging Europe across cultures, chosen by the European Commission following a 2016 call for proposals for Creative Europe Culture Cooperation Projects. Besides Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the international partners in the European project include the University of Warwick and Queen Mary University of London (England), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich (Germany), and the Teatrul Municipal Tony Bulandra, Targoviste (Romania).

The sixteen workshop participants were selected through a call for applications followed up by an audition. The analysis of movement and improvisation were the two main areas of study in the workshop. Starting from the discovery of the mask as an expressive instrument, the students explored actors’ movements in space and techniques of acting and stylization. The workshop enabled the participants to acquire expressive languages as the basis for building character improvisations.
The workshop was also part of the preparations of a production based on a re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s Andronicus Titus, due to be completed by September 2017. The first performance will be staged in October as part of the 2017-2018 season at the Teatrul Bulandra.