Christopher Edwards, Director of Education

Christopher Edwards is the Associate Artistic Director and the Director of Education at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. He previously attended a workshop, led by Bill Rauch, at the Oregon Shakespeare that used hip-hop to approach Hamlet.

Interview Excerpt

CHRISTOPHER EDWARDS: I think working on this piece with Bill and—and the group the first day, initially I—I could see there was a little bit of reticence—is that the right word?—reticence to sort of jump in and work at it from a place of—you know, because with hip hop you don’t just work from the text basically, and say, “Oh, the text is the ground and we have to move from there.”

You might work from the DJ and language can come from that, or you might work from the emcee and—and graffiti art come from that, or you might work from the—the dancer and talk about what the dancer’s doing. So there’s this, you know, sort of way of working that’s non-linear, for a lack of a better term, or not just focused on one element, which is the text.

And usually with a Shakespeare theater that’s what they’re going to do. This is what the text says so therefore everything moves from that nucleus. And it’s not necessarily the case in hip hop.