Celebrate Shakespeare with Your Valentine: Davis Town & Gown Sonnet Walk
01-21-2009
On Saturday, Feb. 14—St. Valentine’s Day—join other lovers of poetry (and lovers of life) for a relaxed community Sonnet Walk featuring a joyous, highly creative celebration of Shakespeare’s treasured love poems. Guided strolls will begin at 10 a.m. in downtown Davis and continue at 15-minute intervals, with the last walk departing at 12 noon. This all-ages event is free and open to the public by advance reservation. Refreshments will be served.
The Valentine’s Day Sonnet Walk is directed by Peter Lichtenfels of the UC Davis Department of
Theatre & Dance, which is co-presenting the event with the UC Davis Arboretum and the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Place your reservations and location information via the Mondavi Center box office: Visit MondaviArts.org (use promo code SONNET to avoid handling charges), or call 530-754-2787 or 866-754-2787 (toll-free). Space availability is limited.
The surviving works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) include his “Sonnets” (1609), 154 poems composed in sonnet form and dealing primarily with the profound nature of love, passion and beauty. An English sonnet is a strictly rhymed 14-line lyric poem—“lyric” meaning it expresses a person’s emotions. Clear evidence of this is seen in Sonnet 18—arguably the Bard’s most famous—wherein the speaker emotes, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Peter Lichtenfels is a professional theatre director and writes on Shakespeare and contemporary performance. From 1981 to 1991, he was the artistic director of the Traverse Theatre during the Scottish National resurgence in Britain and the theatre director at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre, where he introduced radical international and alternative theatre to the United Kingdom. He has championed cross-cultural theatre throughout his career and is committed to interdisciplinary work between theatre, dance and performance art. Between 1991 and 2003, he combined his professional theatre directing with an academic post at Manchester Metropolitan University, the only university conservatory program in the U.K. Since arriving at UC Davis in 2003, Lichtenfels has continued to write articles and has just completed a co-written book on Romeo and Juliet: “Negotiating Shakespeare’s Language” (Ashgate 2008), which is accompanied by a full critical edition on the Web. He has also served as chair of the Department of Theatre & Dance (2004–2008) and has created exchanges with Shakespeare’s Globe London and the Shanghai Theatre Academy. He currently sits on the Mondavi Center oversight committee.
• Valentine’s Day Sonnet Walk
• Sat., Feb. 14, 10 a.m.-12 noon
• Reservations required
• 530-754-2787
866-754-2787 (toll-free)
530-754-5402 (TDD)
MondaviArts.org
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