Dani Buglione had good grades in school but struggled to express herself outside of class. Then she discovered acting.

“It was like this whole different world opened up to me,” the 14-year-old Saltus Grammar School student said. “One of my first parts was as Tinker Bell in a school play. Soon after that I got my first major role in Shakespeare’s The Tempest , with the part of Ariel.

“I still struggled sometimes with opening myself up to other people at school, but eventually I found the only way I could express myself was on the stage.”

The teenager was one of 165 students who participated in the Shakespeare Schools Festival workshop last week.

Edward Daranyi, of Canada’s Stratford Festival, taught the middle and high school students how to better understand the works of William Shakespeare.

“The funny thing with Shakespeare is a lot of students hear what we’ll be studying and they go, ‘Ugh’. They don’t understand it and they fear it,” he said.

“They think it’s too hard, so part of what I do, my job, is to say this is actually simple and so easy and this is how we can have a lot of fun doing it.”

Dani was initially nervous about the intensive acting workshop, saying: “It felt like I was walking into something extremely different, especially being in Bermuda. It’s far bigger than what I’m used to for drama but then I decided I might as well try to get as much out of it as I possibly can.”

By the end of the three-hour workshop she felt on top of the world.

“I learnt that once you understand the text you can go deeper with it,” she said. “I feel like I’m able to tell these stories and really got what Shakespeare was trying to do when he wrote them.

“I also had a lot of fun doing it. It was definitely a new experience, something different from our normal class.”

Mr Daranyi, 48, said one of his biggest joys was seeing young people’s eyes light up about Shakespeare.

“I like to see pennies dropping and the ‘aha’ moments and in every single school I’ve been to in Bermuda I’ve seen at least five or six ‘aha’ moments in each class,” he said. “That’s more than I could have asked for.

“They realise Shakespeare is more than just something they can quote on a test. A lot of them leave with a renewed confidence, knowing they have the skills to approach the text and make it their own. That classifies as a victory for me.”

Mr Daranyi caught the acting bug in high school. His 11th grade teacher in Kitchener, Ontario, walked into the classroom and was shocked to find the students were not engaged with Shakespeare’s text.

“The teacher stopped us and basically said, ‘What are you people doing? Why are you just sitting and reading silently? This isn’t a novel. This is Shakespeare. It has to be put on its feet. You have to say the words out loud for it to make any sense at all’. That was the tipping point for me. Up until then I looked at Shakespeare as a thing to do in English class. It was a novel study for me.”

The teacher later took the class on a field trip to the Stratford Festival.

“We went and it was like something was solidified in my head,” he said. “The moment I saw that company and that play I said, ‘I’m going to work there one day’. It was a magical experience.”

He loves that he gets to live out his dream every day.

“I don’t feel like I’m going to work and haven’t felt like that for the last 17 years,” he said.

“I go to the rehearsals and we play. There’s someone who has to go put on a suit, work in an office and make all sorts of crazy decisions. I just spend my time playing. We both contribute something important to society, but just in totally different ways.”

Mr Daranyi is also involved in outreach work in poverty-stricken areas such as Mozambique and El Salvador. He is part of a team that helps budding actors to set up small theatre groups there.

“We’re trying to create a pocket of economic stability in the arts, just like the festival did for Stratford in 1953,” he said.

“In those days there was a railway that just pulled up and left the area and it was struggling with extremely high levels of unemployment. So when they founded this festival, it was an immediate hit and brought in a ton of employment, economic activity and tourism to the city to fill that gap.

“On a small scale we try to do the same thing in places like El Salvador. We have a group in Central America that has now gone through a three-year course. Some have stayed on to work with us, while some have gone on to other pursuits like welding, carpentry and seamstressing.

“But every time I go back I don’t even have to be told who’s in the programme, I can spot them. There’s a confidence in the way they hold themselves. They just exude confidence that many others in their peer group don’t have.”