JOHN NYGRO

JOHN NYGRO

 

        As a lecturer, John Nygro has spoken on a number of subjects from classical theater and opera to medieval and Renaissance music to film and television. He has taught seminars at the Newberry Library in Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses: Power, Action and Conflict, Shakespeare’s Hollow Crown, Six Shakespeare Heroines, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Exploring Medieval Music, Renaissance Musical Theater, Shakespeare Complete Sonnets and Poetry and Music Inspired by Shakespeare; Louis XIV, the Arts and the Glory of France as well as an eight-week course in Baroque Opera.

 

       He lectures regularly for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of Chicago Chapters as well as libraries, senior centers and cultural organizations in the Chicago area. 

 

       For the Center for Life and Learning, where he is a regular instructor in Stage and Screen, he has taught six-week courses: What is Comedy? A Look at Contemporary Comedy, Six Silent Film Dramas, Films About the Theater, Discovering Undiscovered Opera, Six British Television Comedies and Four Silent Horror Films. 

 

       For The Harwood Early Music Ensemble, John has lectured on medieval, Renaissance and early Baroque music giving various lecture-demonstrations both in concert and on radio broadcasts. Highlights of those talks include “Ben Jonson: The Masque of Oberon,” “Renaissance Antiphonal Music at Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice,” “Creating Performing Scores from Medieval Manuscripts” and “Madrigalisms in Luca Marenzio Second Book of Madrigals.” 

 

       For the Jane Austen Society of North America, he has co-presented a talk, “Divas of Jane Austen’s Day.” He has also lectured for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as well as numerous Lyric Opera of Chicago Chapters. 

 

       He frequently appears at many Chicago area libraries and arts organizations presenting talks on many subjects. He has also lectured for Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he spoke numerous times across the country for the Association of Standardized Patient Educators. For that organization he has presented “Hiring a Visually Impaired Actor,” “An Actor Performance Evaluation Plan—Do You Have One?,” “Training Actors to Give Feedback to Medical Students,” “The Three Pillars of Acting" and “Coaching Actors to Portray Pain.”

 

        As an actor, John has studied Shakespeare Folio Technique with Barbara Gaines and Robert Scogin and has portrayed several Shakespearean roles—Capulet in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Holofernes in Love’s Labours Lost, Feste in Twelfth Night, the Duke in The Comedy of Errors, Albany in The Tragedy of King Lear and Snug in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He has appeared as the male lover in Mine Owne Sweete Jewell, a Shakespeare program of scenes and sonnets with The Heroic Bard. For The Heroic Bard he has also appeared as Dante Alighieri in Dante's New Life, Walt Whitman in Walt Whitman’s Civil War Memories and the Narrator in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as Sancho Panza in Don Quixote of La Mancha.

 

        As a musician and conductor, John Nygro is the founder and director of The Harwood Early Music Ensemble. For Harwood he has conducted and performed from 1980-1995 in more than 175 concerts, lecture demonstrations, radio broadcasts and recordings. With Harwood he has researched, scored, programmed, rehearsed and performed more than fifteen hundred compositions covering most musical styles from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and early Baroque. He has coached dozens of singers and instrumentalists in the performance of early music. As a harpsichordist and organist, he has collaborated with various artists including Judith Nelson, Max van Egmond, Alan Fast, Kevin Mason, Mary Springfels and Martha Herr. As a musician, he has toured England performing concerts at Saint Martin in the Fields, The London Musical Club and the nine-hundred year old Milton Abbey. The Chicago Sun-Times said, “ . . . Nygro is one of Chicago’s biggest early music success stories" and Chicago magazine subscribers voted Nygro as, "One of the most interesting people in Chicago."

 

        As a narrator John has appeared in dozens of training videos for international corporations as well as in ads as a small business owner for the United States Post Office, as an international traveler on an in-flight video for duty-free shopping and as a scientist teacher in the video introduction to the Field Museum’s exhibit, "Underground Adventure." He has also narrated children’s programs with the Elgin Symphony and has appeared with Chicago a cappella as Frank Lloyd Wright in "Music in the Life of Frank Lloyd Wright."

 

        As a translator, John has rendered hundreds of medieval and Renaissance poems from romance languages into modern English. He has translated Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova (The New Life) for The Heroic Bard where he performed the work with lute accompaniment.

 

        As an acting coach, he has worked with hundreds of actors at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine where he trained them to perform as Standardized Patients. These patients portrayed a variety of complex physical and psychological conditions so that medical students could practice their bedside manner for encounters with future patients.

 

CV Available Upon Request

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