Benjamin Archer

My research is situated at the intersection of actor training, Shakespearean performance, and Practice-as-Research (PaR). I am particularly interested in making Shakespeare’s plays accessible to contemporary actors through embodied, character-led methodologies. My doctoral research developed The Shakespeare Toolkit, which adapts Stanislavsky’s “system,” Elizabethan rehearsal practices, and First Folio techniques to create a practice-first pedagogy for performing Shakespeare.

More broadly, my work investigates the pedagogical challenges of what I define as “The Shakespeare Problem”: the disjunction between text-centric literary analysis and embodied performance practice in actor training. 

In November I will be presenting at The S Word: Stanislavsky and Contemporary Theatre Symposium at the University of Malta, and I have a trilogy of articles forthcoming in Stanislavski Studies.