If you haven’t booked your vacation yet, and want to combine advancing your stage and screen career amid an historic setting, Shake Alley Workshops in Mineral Point, Wisconsin is the right destination.
Located three hours from Chicago in northwest Wisconsin, the workshops will be held Aug. 2-8 in a charming town that dates back to the 1820s.
Sundance Institute creative director Joan Darling heads the list of 10 distinguished writers, producers, directors, actors and acting coaches who will lead 16 workshops throughout the week.
This is the fourth year of workshops, noted Sandra Scott, board president of the Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts, which is owned and operated by a local non-profit group.
To launch it, she said, “It took the length of a phone call to begin to assemble this array of instructors. Joan Darling and Bill Svanoe are long time friends, and when we first created Shake Rag Alley as a non-profit school, I asked if they would consider coming to Wisconsin. They said, ‘tell us when and we will be there.’ They have helped develop the curriculum and connect with the instructors.
“We love coming to the Wisconsin .” says Darling. ” The students here are the best?eager, receptive, appreciative. And the range of talent we have encountered here has been extraordinary”.
Darling is an award-winning actress, DGA winner and the first woman director to win an Emmy and typical of the high caliber of talent assembled for the concentrated training week.
On the screen side, there’s legendary executive produce/director Peter Bogart, whose important list of movies include “ConAir,” “Ali,” “American Gigolo;” award-winning writer/producer/director John Hanson (“Northern Lights”) a veteran of indie films; television writer/director Blake Bradford (“Live at Lincoln Center”), who co-founded New York theatre company Phare Play Productions.
