Bard to Go performance wraps Shakespeare Festival

Grand Valley State University’s all-student traveling Shakespeare company, Bard to Go, will hold the final performance of its 2014 Shakespeare Festival play, "Lights, Camera, Action!" Saturday, November 1.

This year’s new 50-minute interactive Shakespearean collage follows William Shakespeare on an adventure to modern-day Hollywood, where movie studio producers work to convince him to update his plays for modern-day audiences. Will Shakespeare’s plays now include vampires, light saber fights and reality TV bits? "Lights, Camera, Action!" features scenes from “The Tempest,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Macbeth,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

"Bard to Go: Lights, Camera, Action!"
November 1 at 1 p.m.
Loosemore Auditorium, DeVos Center, Pew Grand Rapids Campus

Immediately preceding this public performance of "Bard to Go: Lights, Camera, Action!" will be an awards ceremony honoring the winners of the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival Annual Student Competition. The competition features Grand Valley student entries in literary, visual and performing arts.

Bard to Go, part of the educational outreach program incorporated into the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival, is comprised of six Grand Valley students and a student stage manager. Karen Libman, Bard to Go director and professor of theater at Grand Valley, said the primary goal of Bard to Go is to reinvigorate Shakespeare’s work for younger audiences by touring eight local secondary schools during the Shakespeare Festival in the fall each year.

“Our goal when we started Bard to Go was never to take a fully formed, highly produced show into the schools,” said Libman. ”It was always to give students an opportunity to see Shakespeare in a fresh and vital way and then we hope that the teachers take it to the next level.”

In its 14-year history, Bard to Go has given more than 13,000 students throughout Michigan an opportunity to experience Shakespeare. The group has also traveled around the world to perform in Italy, the Czech Republic, the Bahamas, China and Canada among other national and international locations. For the first time in the group’s history, Bard to Go performed in Grand Rapids during this year’s annual ArtPrize event as an time-based entry on Grand Valley’s Pew Grand Rapids Campus.

For more information about the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival, visit www.gvsu.edu/shakes.