The 2 SLAM Rounds Explained
Chicago Shakespeare Slam encourages ensemble performance, focusing on what happens when performers engage in conversation with one another—and with their audience.
SCENE Round
[Time limit: 5 minutes • Participants: 2–8 team members]
Students perform a single scene (or a cut version of a single scene) from any of Shakespeare’s plays.
- For the Scene Round, language should be cut to streamline a scene—or even to cut out a character.
- Remaining text is performed “as is,” without remixing, reordering, or tossing in other text—save that for the Dream Round!
DREAM Round
[Time limit: 5 minutes • Participants: all members of the team]
Dreams are mixed-up, ransacked—and most of all, personal-retellings. They are our imaginations gone wild. And voila! The Dream Round!
Students will devise a “remixed” performance piece to explore a character, theme, or story that they want to tell in an original and creative way. Unlike the Scene Round, which is a single linear Shakespearean scene, for the Dream Round students mash-up text into a wholly original and imaginative performance piece, created from:
- text sampled from A Midsummer Night’s Dream exclusively, OR
- language from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream “in conversation” with a single published author, playwright, poet, orator, or songwriter
Meant to be a conversation with Shakespeare, like any good “conversation,” you want to hear from both parties on the subject— something like a 50/50 split as a goal. That kind of equal split gives students the chance to really wrestle with Shakespeare. Ideally, your audience will be hugely aware of Shakespeare’s presence, hearing lots of echoes in your performance script of themes, ideas, characters, relationships in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream!