shakespeare's heartbeat

Shakespeare’s Heartbeat is an innovative arts curriculum that uses the heartbeat rhythm of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter along with the characters’ physicality and the plays’ poetic language rooted in emotion to bring arts enrichment to neurodiverse students. This hands-on programming provides arts access to students who may not otherwise have the opportunity to engage in a performing arts curriculum. In this creative practice, theater games target skills such as kinesthetic awareness, turn-taking and facial emotion recognition to strengthen students’ ability to interact with others and promote social and emotional learning and growth.

Shakespeare’s Heartbeat offers students a weekly structured time to investigate the arts, interact as a community, and develop social emotional skills. The joyful, community-based nature of the performing arts also provides teachers with a powerful educational tool that naturally lends itself to addressing the “whole child” in the classroom. Additionally, the plays themselves offer opportunities to sensitively engage with issues students are confronted with, such as questions of self advocacy in The Tempest and articulating emotion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Shakespeare’s Heartbeat is designed to not only increase students’ cognitive and verbal abilities but actively develops confidence and self-esteem through helping students overcome barriers to interpersonal connection. Festival staff collaborate with school-based teachers and administrators to modify programming in order to best suit the needs of individual students and classrooms. This included adapting curriculum to online programming during the pandemic and fostering parent and caregiver participation. The locations that partner with Shakespeare’s Heartbeat are under-resourced schools with limited arts access and challenging academic environments.

Program History

Shakespeare’s Heartbeat was brought to the Festival and supported by Joseph Schmitz of Eureka Street Learning, with the curriculum based upon the Hunter Heartbeat Method by Kelly Hunter of Flute Theater fame. Beginning in special day classes at Francisco Middle School in 2017, Shakespeare’s Heartbeat continued to serve this community through the pandemic, additionally expanding to three San Francisco Unified School District middle schools: Aptos, Marina, and Everett.

Program Impact
With Shakespeare’s Heartbeat, we approach district goals and standards through specialized curriculum and a focus on addressing the core social and communication challenges faced by neurodiverse students. The curriculum introduces students to the theater and utilizes performance to gently exercise social and communication skills that children on the spectrum struggle with, such as making eye contact, spatial awareness, personal space and boundaries, reading faces, and expressing feelings. This approach has been shown to improve skills that can increase neurodiverse students’ ability for connection, interaction and self-expression. Through this work addressing arts integration, social emotional growth and equitable practices, we align with our district’s Arts Plan.

Our anticipated program outcomes for students include increasing cognitive competence; developing self esteem, self-expression, and communication skills; improving social competence through cooperation, and collaboration.