Without wonder and insight,
acting is just a business. With it,
it becomes creation
SUMMER CONSERVATORY
Visionbox Summer Theatre Conservatory at McNichols 2021
A collaboration between Visionbox Studio Theatre and The McNichols Cultural Partner Program in Denver, CO.
Vision Statement:
To build resiliency and independence in young theatre artists who face the accelerated rate of change in our time.
Mission Statement:
The Conservatory will provide the skills, practices, and experience young theatre artists need to develop their own deeply personal work in a community dedicated to collaboration, excellence, and innovation.
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ABOUT
The Conservatory, in residence at the McNichols Civic Center, in downtown Denver, assembles a group of the highest level of theatre professionals with different skill sets to work with high school and college students in an intensive, fully focused way. The Conservatory is geared toward high school and college students, but others are welcome to apply and will be considered.
Founding Artistic Director, Jennifer McCray Rincon, has over four decades of training, teaching, and experience in professional theatre. She received her B.A. in Theatre Studies from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Directing from the Yale School of Drama. She received a Fulbright Fellowship in Bogota, Colombia and directed at the Teatro Popular de Bogota. Ms. Rincon was the Head of Acting at the National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center of Performing Arts from 1991 - 2008 and has taught acting for Visionbox Studio Theatre for the past decade. She founded Visionbox Studio in 2010 to provide student and professional actors in Denver with training rooted in graduate-level study taught by theatre professionals. As an extension of that training, the company produces new intermedia performance work that explores the social and human issues of our time.
THE INTENSIVES
1. Realism Intensive - June 14th - June 25th
Up to 16 students will be accepted into the two-week acting intensive focusing on Classical American Realism.
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MORNING CLASSES, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM, will include Audition Technique, Voice and Speech, Singing, and Design (projection, AR, and VR for Theatre).
AFTERNOON CLASSES, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM, classes will be taught by Jennifer Rincon and focus on acting in plays by writers including Tennesse Williams, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Eugene O'Neill. This program will prepare students for ongoing work in high school, colleges and conservatory programs. While the program supports students interested in pursuing the performing arts at a college and professional level, the training will also help any student with advanced text analysis skills, public speaking, and ensemble work.
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2. Shakespeare Intensive - July 19th - July 30th
This intensive is dedicated to studying poetry and character in Shakespeare’s plays. Scansion, language structure, metaphor, and image will be the foundation for study in this class and will move actors to a deeper understanding of style. Actors will work on sonnets and soliloquy and will move into scene work from all of the Shakespeare canon. Morning classes, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM, will include Audition Technique, Voice and Speech, Singing, and Design (projection, AR, and VR for Theatre). 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM classes will be Acting Classes taught by Jennifer Rincon.
Original Solo Shakespeare Projects will be an integral part of this intensive. Students will select one character from the Shakespeare canon and create a solo performance piece that integrates Shakespeare text with other writing including novels, contemporary plays, and personal writing. These solo pieces will be produced live and filmed at McNichols, July 19th - 23rd.
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3. Contemporary Performance Intensive All the World:
Festival of Solo-Shakespeare Performances - August 2nd - August 6th.
Visionbox Studio has developed and produced Solo-Shakespeare performances since its founding. Actors in classes and members of our professional Ensemble work on these pieces over long periods of time. Each piece explores one character from Shakespeare from the lens of contemporary culture and literature. 50% of each piece must be Shakespeare text, and the other 50% can come from personal writing, contemporary novels, and plays. These pieces were originally conceived by Tony Church at The Guildhall School in England and produced for two decades at The National Theatre Conservatory.
APPLICATION
TO APPLY:
Tuition is $1,500 per 2 week Intensive. $750 for the Production Intensive. Use the Button Below to fill out an application.
Financial Aid applications may also be found using The Button Below:
Each student must attend a group workshop and personal interview with Jennifer Rincon and other staff.
Email using the Button Below to schedule a workshop and interview:
Application Deadline (Realism): June 7th, 2021
Application Deadline (Shakespeare): July 1st, 2021
To schedule a free acting workshop and information session please email us.
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Address for Summer Classes:
McNichols Civic Center Building
144 W Colfax Ave
Denver, CO 80202
For more information please contact us at info@visionbox.org , call 720-810-1641
COST Per Intensive: $1,500
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Paying by Check
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If you are paying by check, please make out to "Visionbox Studio" and mail to:
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Visionbox Studio
7108 E Lowry Blvd, Unit 2114,
Denver Colorado 80230
​Paying Now Online
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Realism Intensive
(June 14th - June 25th)
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Shakespeare Intensive
(July 19th - July 30th)
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Contemporary Performance Intensive
All the World
(August 2nd - August 6th)
SUMMER CONSERVATORY FACULTY
Jennifer McCray Rincon
Founding Artistic Director/ Head of Acting
Jennifer McCray Rincón received her BA in Theatre Studies from Yale University and an MFA in Directing from the Yale School of Drama. She was recipient of an NEA Directing Fellowship at Playwright’s Horizons in NYC and a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Bogota, Colombia. After many years in New York, Ms. Rincón came to Denver as the Head of Acting at the National Theatre Conservatory, where she remained from 1991 through 2008. At the DCPA Ms. Rincón taught acting in the 3-year MFA Acting program and directed over 100 productions including Equus, Othello, The Laramie Project, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, The 365 Project, Monte Carlo, and Expedition 6 by Bill Pullman. Locally, Ms. Rincon has directed for El Centro Su Teatro, Shadow Theatre, The Historic Old Elitches Theatre, and was Founding Artistic Director of the Lizard Head Theatre Company in Telluride.
Since founding Visionbox Studio Theatre in 2010 Jennifer McCray Rincon has taught acting to Denver student and professional actors in five week sequences culminating in performances. She has also developed and directed a number of workshops and productions for Visionbox including: The Wild Hunt by Bill Pullman, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley, Lydie Breeze by John Guare, After the Fall by Arthur Miller, 2xTENN by Tennessee Williams, A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas with William Youmans, The Othello Project, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello and My Two Sisters, an adaptation of Chekhov's Three Sisters.
Phillip Baldwin
Head of Scenography & Interactive Media
Phillip Baldwin, MFA Yale, Associate Professor, Stony Brook University. Over 30 years of integrating the arts and design, with technology.
Is a scenographer, designer, author, educator, UX/UI consulting, business person, art and technology installation artist, associate professor of design and digital media, and immersive environment designer. He devotes equal effort to Academic/Professing fields as well as in the for-profit IT research fields. Has current research and authorship in the relationship of space to telematics and telepresence, Virtual reality and 'spaces of shared experience'. He designed for Film, the stage, Modern Dance, Events, and public projection mapping commissions. Recipient of four international awards in Design including the Rome Prize, Japan foundation prize, Korea foundation award, and Korean industrial development in STEAM and the creative tech curriculum Co-Pi of 700k from the Korean Minister of Culture.
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Jill Teas
Head of Music
Jill is the co-founder and musical director for Voices Rock, Denver's original adult rock choir with over 500 singers throughout Colorado. With performances from Red Rocks to Ted Talks, she has established herself as one of the premier choir directors in the area. She has taught choral and general music for twenty-eight years in Atlanta and Denver where she has directed multiple award-winning youth choirs. In Denver, Jill taught music at Stanley British Primary school for eleven years where she directed 150 children in her 3-4-5 choir as well as vocal ensembles in the middle school. She has co-directed multiple musical theatre productions at Stanley as well as the Kent Denver summer arts program. She brings tremendous energy and enthusiasm to all of her musical direction and performances. Jill spent two years with the international performing group, Up With People, including a year as the vocal coach on their staff. Jill has been singing professionally in Athens and Atlanta, Georgia and throughout Denver for the past twenty-eight years. Jill maintains a private voice studio for singers of all ages. She holds a degree in music education/voice concentration from the University of Georgia.
Gary Logan
Voice & Speech Instructor
GARY LOGAN, M.F.A., Associate Professor, Speech and Dialects (Tenured)
Gary Logan is the Associate Professor of Speech and Dialects at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, and was formerly the director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company's MFA program, the Academy for Classical Acting at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he also taught Ear-Training and Acting: Shakespeare. He is the author of the highly acclaimed The Eloquent Shakespeare: A Pronouncing Dictionary for the Complete Dramatic Works, with Notes to Untie the Modern Tongue (University of Chicago Press), and is the recipient of a Tyrone Guthrie Award. He has worked as a voice, text, and dialect coach on over 140 professional productions, with companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Shakespeare Theatre, Folger Theatre, Studio Theatre, Signature Theatre, Everyman Theatre, Ford's Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, the Denver Center, the Kennedy Center, Chautauqua Theatre, and many more. Clients to whom he has taught dialects include Tyne Daly, Scott Bakula, Christine Lahti, and Brian Bedford. Frequently invited to be a Visiting Guest Artist to share his expertise in Phonetics, Shakespeare's Language, and Dialects, he has taught at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa, the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, Scotland, the Stratford Festival of Canada, Dartmouth College, and the Chautauqua Theatre Company Conservatory, just to name a few. He has held permanent and adjunct positions at the Academy for Classical Acting, The George Washington University, the University of Maryland, the National Theatre Conservatory (where he was mentored by Tony Church, founding member of the RSC), the University of Denver, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has directed over 40 plays, for both professional theatres and for MFA programs, and has acted in scores of plays at the American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco, the Missouri Repertory Theatre, Kansas City, the Denver Center Theatre, Denver, and many others. He was on the Board of Advisors for the National Center for Voice and Speech, and has been a senior faculty member of Canada's annual National Voice Intensive for more than twenty years. Working closely with directors such as Michael Kahn, Sir Peter Hall, John Barton, Maria Aitken, Stephen Wadsworth, Vivienne Benesch, David Muse, Robert Richmond, Nagle Jackson, Israel Hicks, Ethan McSweeny, and Laird Williamson, he has become a trusted colleague and practitioner of dialects, phonetics, rhetoric, voice, and acting. He holds an MFA from ACT, where his teachers included Bill Ball, Edith Skinner, Yat Malmgren, Allen Fletcher, and Catherine Fitzmaurice. He has been in or produced over 800 voice-overs and continues to enjoy studio work. Recently, his poetry was published in Poets Are Present, an anthology.
Tal Arnold
Tal Arnold is proud to be the Associate Artistic Director of Visionbox. He began his theatrical career here and has since worked in Denver, Chicago and LA as an Actor, Lighting Designer, Director and Instructor. He has performed improv comedy at iO and the Comedy Club in Chicago. Visionbox introduced him to the work and joy of the theatre, and he couldn't be more proud and grateful to be back home.
Associate Artist Director / Improv
Ryan Shea
Ryan Shea is a producer, editor and multi-faceted technician who has worked extensively in the film and theatre mediums. He is currently a computer science major with an arts concentration at Yale University in New Haven.