Department of Theater and Dance offers free classes and tickets to local schools

"Heather Stanford’s students can’t sit still. She won’t let them. They mill about the room, seething and bowing and dying with panache. The 14 11th-graders who started the class with practiced indifference now laugh and throw themselves into the exercises, because what could be more engaging for teenagers than “Hamlet”?

And that’s how it should be, insisted Stanford, academic coordinator and lecturer in the Department of Theater and Dance at UC Santa Barbara. She’d come to Santa Ynez High School to get the kids out from behind their desks to experience Shakespeare as it was intended: on their feet, face to face, feeling the humanity in the words."

To read a full story on amazingly succesfull departmetnal pilot program click here.