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Kentucky
Shakespeare Festival
1387 South Fourth Street
Louisville,
KY 40208
Phone: (502) 637-4933
Fax: (502) 637-9261
Website: www.kyshakes.org
"Kentucky
Shakespeare Festival joined the Fund for the Arts in 1986.
FFTA
support is directly responsible for the continuation of
the grand forty-six year tradition of free summer performances
in Louisville's inner city Central Park.
Through
a strategic initiative, Fund for the Arts became the major
underwriter of Kentucky Shakespeare Festival's Bard Buddies
program, an interactive participatory performance workshop
designed for third grade students. Implemented in the 2000-01
academic year, Bard Buddies served every third grade student
in sixty-two Jefferson County Public Schools.
In
addition, the Fund for the Arts has served Kentucky Shakespeare
Festival through the Arts Leadership Institute, which has
provided the opportunity to study the best practices of
leading corporations and businesses. Monthly Lunch Club
meetings at the Fund for the Arts facilities allow arts
leaders the opportunity to discuss current issues and challenges
facing their organizations."
Kentucky Shakespeare Festival is a non-profit, professional
theatre company, founded in 1960 and incorporated in 1963.
Our mission is to enhance community life by providing accessible,
professional, classical theatre and quality educational
outreach programs. Our goal is inclusion.
We
fundamentally believe that art is for everyone, not just
for those who can afford to pay the cost of a ticket. It
has been our forty-six year mission to create programs which
provide opportunities to everyone, regardless of their financial
and physical limitations, to view the works of William Shakespeare.
We continue to serve the underserved of our community, our
state and our region.
The
cornerstone of the Festival is our summer season, in which
Shakespearean plays are produced. The performances are offered
completely free of charge and are held in the C. Douglas
Ramey Amphitheater located in inner city Central Park in
the heart of Old Louisville's historic preservation district.
In the last forty-six years, over one half million people
have enjoyed the Festival's one hundred and eleven summer
productions.
Through
our educational outreach programs of Will on Wheels, the
Festival is proud to be the first professional arts organization
in Kentucky to tour educational outreach programs to every
county in the Commonwealth. Since 1990, we have performed
in all of Kentucky's 120 counties, as well as Indiana, Missouri,
Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia, serving
over 325,000 kindergarten through twelfth grade students.
Also part of Will on Wheels, is our nationally renowned
program, Shakespeare Behind Bars. It is the only prison
program in North America in which inmates produce full-length
First Folio productions of the plays of William Shakespeare
with men playing the female roles.
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