Class Overview:

The Shakespeare Workout is a four-week working group led by Stratford Festival actor Austin Eckert, created for actors who want to deepen their relationship to Shakespeare’s language through active, performance-driven exploration. This intimate pilot cohort is designed as a space to slow down and engage deeply with the work - focusing on breath, clarity of thought, impulse, text analysis, and practical tools for making the language feel immediate, embodied, and playable. Participants will work on scenes, speeches, and exercises that strengthen connection to thought, language and relationship while building confidence and flexibility with classical text. At its core, the room is designed to be rigorous yet supportive, welcoming actors at a range of experience levels who are curious to engage deeply with the work in an ensemble environment. Our emphasis here is process, discovery, and building a grounded, personal relationship to the language rather than achieving a finished product. Austin Eckert is a Canadian stage and screen actor with over a decade of experience across North America, including multiple seasons at the Stratford Festival. His teaching focuses on clarity, textual accuracy, presence, and helping actors build a grounded, personal relationship with Shakespeare’s verse. Participants will leave with practical tools for approaching Shakespeare’s verse, greater confidence working within the text, and the development of appropriate audition material through scene and soliloquy work.

Instructor:

Austin Eckert is an award-winning, Toronto-based actor whose work includes multiple seasons at the Stratford Festival as well as theatre, film, and television projects across Canada and the US. Alongside his performance career, he has led workshops, classes, and residencies with institutions including the Stratford Festival and Bard on the Beach, focusing on helping actors build clarity, confidence, and immediacy in their work within classical text.