After the Curtains Fall
Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Outreach Programs Continue Year-Round
To most of the public, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival simply arrives each summer, much like the many traveling troupes and players who enact many of the great playwright’s works.
From June to August, the festival typically produces three to five plays, most from the Shakespeare canon, and at least one “adjacent” work. With more than 65 seasons under its belt CSF is the second-longest running such festival in North America.
But CSF doesn’t disappear after the final curtain call each summer. Throughout the year, it leverages the works of Shakespeare to support education, violence prevention, self-knowledge and community engagement.
“We reach nearly 11,000 people a year through our programs,” says Director of Outreach Amanda Giguere. She thinks of it as a “pyramid of impact,” with the top reaching the smallest number of people, but having the most in-depth engagement.
CSF in the Schools: Shakespeare & Violence Prevention, co-founded with the University of Colorado Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence in 2011, serves as a sturdy foundation for the pyramid, having reached some 140,000 Colorado students with one-day forays into classrooms across the state.
“We try to get students to think about what human behavior looks like. They step into the plays and practice their own strategies about how to prevent harm,” Giguere says. CSF is now about one-third of the way toward its goal of presenting the program in every Colorado county.
It has been featured on PBS Newshour and exported to England’s Shakespeare Globe and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of The Bard. It’s also the subject of Giguere’s forthcoming book, Shakespeare and Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators (University Press of Colorado, 2025).
Next up on the pyramid are CSF’s programs for adults, which include a webinar series, Classics 101, pre-show lectures, and Bard’s Book Club, an online reading club with dramaturg Heidi Schmidt.
This year, the festival is preparing to launch a new program, Bard’s Backstage Pass, a “camp” for adults “for people who are looking to dig deeper with Shakespeare,” Giguere says. “It’s a series of experiences on campus, from a visit to Norlin Library’s rare-books collection to Q&A’s with actors and directors.”
Adults, teens and children are also welcome to attend free, informal pre-show talks, or prologues, 45 minutes before each performance to learn about each play’s historical context, plot, characters, themes, and more. The pre-show talks are written by CSF’s dramaturgs and delivered by members of the CSF staff. In 2025, the Prologue series is supported by Mark Ragan and Jamie Shaak on behalf of the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company.
Moving up, the Will Power Festival takes Shakespeare into five different 4th– and 5th-grade programs at public and private schools, engaging some 200 local students. The program is supported by the Jensen Family Will Power Endowment.
“Each school gets a different act of the play. They don’t meet until the day of the performance, so it teaches collaboration and teamwork,” Giguere says.
At the top of the pyramid are CSF’s wildly popular summer camps for 60 to 70 children every year. At Camp Shakespeare, students aged 9 to 18 rehearse and perform 30-minute versions of the season’s main plays. Shakespeare’s Sprites is for “littles” aged 6 to 9.
“This year, we’ll have 18 kids performing Doctor Faustus at age 9 … as one does,” Giguere says with a laugh.
Each program contributes not just to a better grasp of Shakespeare, she says, but also helps improve language skills, boosts confidence, builds connection and helps participants better understand themselves as part of their community, culture and world.
“Outreach isn’t really about Shakespeare,” she says in an exaggerated whisper. “It’s about getting familiar with who we are as people, who our peers are and understanding the communities we share.”
Giguere says these outreach programs encourage “perspective hopping,” an important tool in getting to know our fellow humans … and ourselves.
“Working with Shakespeare requires us to slow down and take on multiple viewpoints. It requires complexity of thought,” she says. “And in an unhealthy climate filled with unkindness and hatred, the plays can help us slow down and see ourselves and our communities more clearly through the world of the play.”
With the current presidential administration making drastic changes to federal grant funding, CSF is looking toward its patrons more than ever to continue its year-round work.
And with public funding likely to remain uncertain in the near term, individual donors are more important than ever. CSF has now raised about 72 percent of a $1 million endowment devoted to education and continues to build its annual giving to bolster sustainability, thanks to supporters.
“We want to continue planning projects and hiring, so we’re grateful to all those who support the work we do in our outreach programs,” Giguere says.
After all, CSF is about so much more than putting on plays.
“It’s arts education. But it’s also about social and emotional development that’s critical to healthy society,” Giguere says.
To learn more about getting involved with education and outreach at CSF, visit coloradoshakes.org.