The Puck Project is a Shakespeare performance summer camp program for K-6 students I co-founded with two of my Emory peers, John Gulledge and Mary Taylor Mann. Our program partners with Nicholas House, a shelter and support network for homeless families in metro Atlanta. The four-week camp offers kids at Nicholas House space to explore friendship and familial relationships as presented in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the interpersonal dynamics that surface during the act of performance. During imaginative “play,” young actors become collaborators. Actors practice skills relevant to functioning within a community, formulating and expressing ideas as a team, reading and responding to the emotions of others, and accessing and attending to emotions in oneself. Central to this collaboration is “empathetic imagination:” using our creative mind to identify with those around us.
In the summers of 2018 and 2019, Puck Project was made possible with the generous support of the Jones Program in Ethics at Emory University’s Laney Graduate School. Puck Project took a hiatus in summer 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, we returned Summer 2022 for an amazing week of performance, expression, creative art projects, and written reflection.
To learn more about the theories and methodologies informing Puck Project, please see our publication in Early Modern Culture Online.
More about Puck Project:
Kelly D. Williams, PhD 