Share All Things Bard-Related on Shakespeare Festival St. Louis's New Website, Shake38.com

Shakespeare enthusiasts worldwide will be able to share all things Bard-related on SHAKE38.com, an innovative site developed by Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, going live today, April 23, the playwright's 450th birthday. The project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts ArtWorks, with additional support from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission.

Visitors to the site will be invited to post content pertaining to Shakespeare's life, times, and work. Submissions can be in the form of writing, music, photography, and video. The site will also feature original content from a small group of curators, referred to as "Regulars," who will begin posting articles monthly. Shakespeare Festival St. Louis will link to relevant news and events from around the world about Shakespeare and related productions.

SHAKE38.com is an extension of the Festival's SHAKE 38, which debuted in 2010 as a five-day marathon highlighting Shakespeare's entire canon, with performances by and for the community, in every neighborhood in St. Louis. SHAKE 38 2014 events will kick-off the same day the website goes live.

"SHAKE 38, the event, was born out of the idea to showcase the overwhelming talent in St. Louis and help demystify Shakespeare. The work that came out of these initial performances was fascinating, inspiring, and provocative and I wanted a forum to share this," said Rick Dildine, Artistic and Executive Director of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis.

"Shakespeare and the internet might possibly be the two most accessible tools on the planet," said Dildine. "His stories have affected societies worldwide over the course of the past 400 years, with more than 2,000 words and phrases credited to him that are part of our everyday speech. SHAKE38.com will be a place for people from around the world to connect, share, and create a dialogue about work being developed that is inspired by the Bard."

The SHAKE38 website will be unveiled at the SHAKE 38 kick-off celebration and Bard B-Day Bash April 23 in St. Louis, where the Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra will perform a "musical response" to Love's Labour's Lost. SHAKE 38 highlights this year include: the Tesseract Theatre Company exchanging root beer floats for scene readings from Troilus & Cressida; a production of Measure for Measure performed in Original Pronunciation; and a series of Blind Shakes inviting St. Louisans to a designated location to participate in a play reading. A complete schedule of the five-day SHAKE 38 events is available at sfstl.com.

In the past 13 years, Shakespeare Festival St. Louis has attracted more than 600,000 people to its annual free performances in Forest Park. The season has been made possible with the support of the Regional Arts Commission with financial assistance provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency, and is funded in part by the Arts and Education Council. SFSTL has reached more than 250,000 students through its educational programs. Since 2011, Shakespeare in the Streets has invited St. Louis' neighborhoods to tell their unique stories, shutting down a street in the name of community and theatre. For more information, visit www.sfstl.com or call 314/531-9800.

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