Annika Nori Ahlgrim’s fondness for the Bard reflected in her ongoing work
By Debora Gordon for Ashland.news
An aspiring Shakespeare scholar with a goal of working at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival offers local tutoring, acting classes, and analysis sessions of the Bard’s themes for students.
Annika Nori Ahlgrim, a recent Ashland transplant and former Mountain View, California resident, says she chose her new home because of OSF. A fan of Shakespeare plays since age 13, when she first attended a summer camp through the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival and discovered iambic pentameter in a camp class, she’s now putting that passion into practice.
Her website describes her creative spectrum as “a writer, artist, theater practitioner, and scholar whose work spans long-form narratives, plays, copywriting, digital content, and visual design.”
Ahlgrim, currently an assistant stage manager at the Camelot Theatre in Talent, wants to uncover overlooked voices, confront stigma, and illuminate the complexity of human experience through her work.
A Bard Knock Life
Prior to relocating to Ashland, Ahlgrim attended the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, where she obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater and original works. Her education included acting, writing, and directing at the University of Birmingham, which is connected to the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon, in England.
Her inspiration to move to Ashland came in high school.
“I first came here in 11th grade on a school trip, and I loved it,” Ahlgrim says. “I have always loved Shakespeare, since the iambic pentameter class, and one of my dreams is to be a Shakespeare scholar. I want to work for the Shakespeare Festival. I want to be an assistant director, and eventually director, possibly in the art direction department. I love performing.”
The Write Stuff
Writing has been part of Ahlgrim’s life since childhood, and some of the works she began then continue to be refined.
She’s still at work on a story called “The Skeleton’s Diary,” which she started at age 9. It’s the tale of a girl sent to boarding school by mean parents, where she finds a skeleton in the sub-basement of the boarding school – and it has a diary.
Ahlgrim continues to develop the story, exploring the mental health system and reflecting on her own life as inspiration. She describes her young self as “misunderstood; I was an odd kid, so there was a lot of misunderstanding between me and the grownups around me.”
Classic gothic stories, including “The Secret Garden” and “A Little Princess,” inspired her.
“I love the dark academia genre,” Ahlgrim says. “A lot of it was influenced by the stories that I loved when I was kid, involving mean parents, boarding schools, England, (and) the Moors, which made me love England.”
Her written regimen also includes poetry and sonnet analysis.
Her college senior project, “Erin And Sophie,” is an adaptation of the Pyrasmus and Thisbe story from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” — also highlighted in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Itwas on its way to a reading at a local theater company in Redwood City, California in June 2020. It didn’t happen because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I added Aphrodite and Aries to the story where they’re puppeteers, Aries gets many mortals to play with, to make wars, and Aphrodite gets two mortals to play with at a time, to make love,” Ahlgrim says. “Then, Aphrodite gets a Jewish boy and a Christian girl in Germany in 1938. Her love story is messed up by Aries’ war. She gets angry, and they have this whole showdown where she tries to convince him that he messed up her love story, and, in turn, that messes up his war.”
Ahlgrim has also written short stories, and literal and critical essays. She’s been submitting her works to multiple outlets, including the Feminist Book Club, an online literary magazine that talks about books and social justice, and Driftwood Press.
She is also editing manuscripts and designing book covers for Two Sisters Writing & Publishing, and hopes to write and direct original productions for the Camelot Theatre.
Teaching
Ahlgrim has taught playwright classes on Zoom and has some additional workshops in development, often merging Shakespearean themes with contemporary issues.
Those interested in signing up for finding out more can visit annikanori.com/classesandcoaching.
“I really want to explore women in anger in Shakespeare through our modern lens so bringing a group of people together, and each of them get a monologue or soliloquy from a woman in Shakespeare’s plays,” Ahlgrim says. “It doesn’t really matter what context the monologue or soliloquy is; we’ll explore how the anger comes out, even if it doesn’t seem like there’s anger in the monologue or soliloquy, and also talk how it is to be angry and a woman today in relationship to how women were allowed to, or a man’s perception of women’s anger in Shakespeare’s time.”
Debora Gordon is a writer, artist, educator and non-violence activist who recently moved to Ashland from Oakland, California. Email her at [email protected].
