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PERFORMING ARTS / TEACHER / PERFORMER - MICHAEL CLARIDGE OM 1976
Tell us a bit about your experience...
My theatre experience covers 46 years and 50 productions, all of student theatre, very often, but not only, Shakespeare and contemporaries as well as Shakespeare-related theatre. I always operated in the second language of my students (German at St. Andrews Uni, English at five German universities), and ended my career with 6 years teaching hands-on Shakespeare performance classes at Mainz Uni, in Germany.
My second group (Bamberg Uni), which I set up 40 years ago, has recently performed a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play I did with them ca. 38 years ago - and I will be thereof course!
What inspires you?
I owe my inspiration partly to my mum taking me regularly to the RSC in the late 1960s and 1970s, and partly to the many opportunities offered by Jon Vickery at Monkton. He enabled me to experience drama and take in all sorts of plays in the back-streets theatre he was involved in in Bristol - and thus planted a seed that began to sprout some years later, as I moved from music-making to theatre (although I would later make live music a main element of my own productions).