Associate trainee Amy Scott looks back on Elemental Shakespeare, a 1623 learning project that took place in early June with Matlock Live and Highfields School in Derbyshire.

On the journey to Highfields School, I did not know what to expect from what would be a long day with a class of Year 8 students. I have worked with very young children in the past, but this age group was completely new to me; I have to admit that I was a bit nervous. Ben [Spiller, 1623 artistic director], Chris [Lydon, 1623 resident composer] and I had planned the workshop beforehand. The workshop was to introduce the group to the Matlock Live project: a new 1623 production called Elemental Shakespeare.

The idea behind Elemental Shakespeare was to enable a group of young people to devise a new production based on four scenes from Shakespeare's plays alongside a professional theatre company. Each of the scenes was selected for the way it represented one of the four elements: fire (Macbeth), water (The Tempest), air (A Midsummer Night's Dream) and earth (Hamlet).

We arrived at the school and immediately found ourselves in front of about 40 bright-eyed students. Most were enthusiastic and were impressively intuitive about the meaning of Shakespeare’s text. We got right on with playing games and doing activities that would fuel the the young people's imaginations. Straightaway they were chipping in ideas about how the characters in the scenes were feeling before creating deformed physics of witches and contorted faces of impish fairies.

It was agreed that I’d lead the activities on Macbeth and Hamlet (Ben worked on A Midsummer Night's Dream and Chris on The Tempest). Within minutes, the students were stomping together in time, chanting, “Double, double, toil and trouble” around the canteen rubbish bin used as a cauldron. The energy in the room was electrifying; terrifying, even. Most of the participants had never looked at one of Shakespeare’s plays before, yet here they were totally immersed in one of the most grotesque and supernatural scenes in Macbeth.

Later in the workshop, the students lay on the floor with their eyes closed as I took them on a scripted fantasy to a graveyard where they discovered a skull that used to be an old friend. When the group opened their eyes, Ben was holding a skull while gazing into its eye sockets and said, "Alas, poor Yorick; I knew him, Horatio" before handing the skull to Chris, who had taken on the role of Horatio. Chris did the same and gave the skull to me, then I passed the skull to one of the students and the activity continued until all participants had engaged with the words, the skull and each other. It was amazing how the students understood what to do without us having to give any instructions.

After we left, the Head of Performing Arts at the school chose 30 cast members from the large group we had in the introductory workshop. The next two workshop days would be challenging. We would have our cast, committed to performing two shows: one to the students' families and friends in the school hall and the other to the general public in Hall Leys Park as part of Matlock Live. And we would need to work with the students to create a performance out of the four selected Shakespeare scenes in time for the school’s celebratory event on the evening of our second day with the students.

1623 associate artist Nathan Masterson travelled up from Cornwall to join us for the remaining two workshops. Lines were taken by different students and relationships between characters were explored in a number of games and exercises based on themes and language of the four scenes. Despite facing a few challenges (for example, some students couldn’t make it to one out of two performances), we had our piece by the end of the third workshop.

First came the explosive storm in The Tempest, as the students became sailors singing Ariel's song “Full fathom five thy father lies” to the tune of an old sea shanty. Crashed on the floor, fairies began to emerge, crawling silently to Titania’s bower. In the space of a few moments, Titania fell in love with a donkey, the light-footed fairies all had a good chuckle and then fell asleep with exhaustion. The grave-digging scene in Hamlet followed with the students carrying imaginary shovels and spades digging in time to a beat, getting louder and louder. Then, as Yorick’s skull appeared, gravediggers became witches and everyone in the audience got an earful of the horrifying, witching sound of “Fire burn and cauldron bubble!”

Performing in Hall Leys Park was very different to being in the hall at the school. For a start, not all of our cast turned up. At first, those that were there were disappointed that they’d not been joined by their classmates. This feeling soon disappeared and I was impressed by their ‘show-must-go-on’ attitude. Each one of them pulled together and put on Elemental Shakespeare in and around the bandstand for their friends and families as well as park-lovers who just happened to be passing by. Onlookers cheered at the effort the students put into the piece, before the young performers all ran to their mums, dads and aunties. I remember thinking that the sun shined more than usual that afternoon.

So, it was a good thing that I didn’t know what to expect. By the time we reached the park, the piece belonged to the students, who brought the text to life creatively and expressively, through movement, voice and sound. I really hope that the students will be fans of Shakespeare for life, after their first experience of performing his work with Ben, Chris, Nathan and me. I was really happy that we'd all managed to put together a brand-new show based on Shakespeare's plays in just three days of workshops.

To find out more about 1623's education projects based on the works of Shakespeare, please visit the Learning section of the site.