KC
art
K.C. Ligon (1948-2009)
http://shakespeareoxfordsociety.wordpress.com/?s=k.c.+ligon
K.C. Ligon (1948-2009) in 1981
http://shakespeareoxfordsociety.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/kc10.jpg?w=240&h=300
Remembering K.C. — Hank Whittemore memorializes an Oxfordian friend
<<Friends, colleagues and students of Katherine Dunfee Clarke (K.C.)
Ligon gathered on June 22 in New York to celebrate the life of this
multi-talented and beloved actress, dialect coach, teacher, writer and
leader of the modern Oxfordian movement, who died on March 23 at age
sixty after battling a long illness. The memorial service took place
in the heart of the Broadway theatre district on a Monday evening —
when most stages are dark — at the legendary Circle in the Square,
where K.C. was on the faculty of the Theatre School specializing in
voice, speech and dialects.
In a parallel life, K.C. was deeply involved in the effort to
establish Edward de Vere as Shakespeare. Twenty years ago she won a
playwriting contest sponsored by Ruth Miller (1922-2005), a giant of
Oxfordian research, and they became close friends. She served on the
Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Fellowship, was a top contributor
to its website discussion forum (logging 4,871 posts since 2002) and
wrote articles for the various Oxfordian publications. Recently she
co-authored “The Harvey-Nashe Quarrel and Love’s Labor’s Lost” with
German scholar Robert Detobel that is published on Robert Brazil’s
Elizabethan Authors website. She also created three blogs: K.C.
Ligon’s Blog: About Theatrical, Truly Shakespearean Life, Shakespeare
and Elizabeth: The Myth and the Reality, and Actors and Accents: The
Actors’ Dialect Workbook.
At her memorial, after the crowd took seats at one end of the Circle’s
theater-in-the-round, speaker after speaker turned the occasion into
an emotion-charged outpouring of affection mixed with laughter and
tears, prompted by anecdotes about K.C. as a tough-minded, bluntly
honest, thoroughly professional teacher and coach with deep reservoirs
of empathy along with humor and insight as well as personal style and
flair.
K.C. was fond of saying she had been a professional performer most of
her life, born to it, not in a trunk but appearing on stage even
before she was born – in 1948, when her mother Nora Dunfee was acting
in Red Peppers by Noel Coward. She made her Broadway debut at eight
in the Dylan Thomas play Under Milk Wood and at eleven appeared with
both parents — her father was actor David Clarke — in the national
tour of The Visit with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. A member of the
first graduating class of New York University Tish School of the Arts
Graduate Acting Program, she built an impressive resume of stage and
television credits while also becoming a professional writer.
K.C. designed dialects for entire Broadway productions and for
regional theatre companies around the country. As a dialect consultant
she worked with scores of extraordinary actors such as James Earl
Jones, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Estelle Parsons. She also worked
with actor Tom Ligon – whom she married in 1976 and who, at the
memorial, introduced a video montage of K.C. in photographs that was
both funny and deeply moving.
Also at the service was K.C.’s younger sister, Susan Dunfee; Theodore
Mann, co-founder of the Circle in the Square Theatre; actor-director
Austin Pendleton; and many others who told how K.C. had “performed
miracles” helping hundreds of professional performers and students
with phrasings, breath control, accents and interpretations of their
acting roles.
One graduate of her instructions told how K.C. transformed a young man
who “sounded like a thug” into a polished professional announcer;
another recalled that after K.C. became too ill to travel uptown to
the Theatre School, she summoned everyone down to her apartment in
Greenwich Village and held class there. Tom Ligon described how she
was able to help actors adopt dialects indirectly, that is, by
immersing them within their characters’ settings until their accents
and speech patterns began to change on their own.>>
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elizabeth
> ----------------------------------------------
> K.C. Ligon (1948-2009)http://shakespeareoxfordsociety.wordpress.com/?s=k.c.+ligon
>
> K.C. Ligon (1948-2009) in 1981http://shakespeareoxfordsociety.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/kc10.jpg?...
>
> Remembering K.C. — Hank Whittemore memorializes an Oxfordian friend
>
> <<Friends, colleagues and students of Katherine Dunfee Clarke (K.C.)
> Ligon gathered on June 22 in New York to celebrate the life of this
> multi-talented and beloved actress, dialect coach, teacher, writer and
> leader of the modern Oxfordian movement, who died on March 23 at age
> sixty after battling a long illness. The memorial service took place
> in the heart of the Broadway theatre district on a Monday evening —
> when most stages are dark — at the legendary Circle in the Square,
> where K.C. was on the faculty of the Theatre School specializing in
> voice, speech and dialects.
I only knew her from her posts but she seemed
like a kind and sensitive person. She didn't
defend Looney in the debate over Looney's pointed redactions of
Oxford's letters which made me
admire her ethics (the other Oxfordians require a little moral
direction).
I often run across her posts, I always read them.