The following are some short video highlights from the Korean Tempest film screening and colloquium which took place in Washington, D.C. November 4-5, 2011. (See also performance of Oh Tae-suk’s Tempest from the Edinburgh Festival 2011.)

David Schalkwyk’s opening remarks:

Master Oh’s talk translated by Ah-jeong part 1:

Master Oh’s talk translated by Ah-jeong part 2:

Ah-jeong’s talk part 1 (on Oh’s Romeo and Juliet and the Tempest):

Ah-jeong’s talk part 2:

Ah-jeong’s talk part 3:

Alex’s talk on Oh’s The Tempest:

The foremost Korean director and playwright Oh Tae-suk will visit DC (his Tempest won the Herald Angel award at the 2011 Edinburgh Int’l Festival).

Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and Folger research director David Schalkwyk will give opening remarks at the event at George Washington University.

Film screening of The Tempest (with English subtitles) –

4-6 pm this Friday 11/4 in the Harry Hardin Auditorium in GWU’s Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street, NW

Washington, DC 20052

(Nearest metro station: Foggy Bottom/GWU)

To be followed by a one-day colloquium 9 am – 3:30 pm on Saturday 11/5 in the same venue.

Conference poster –

http://www.gwu.edu/~eall/hms/hms_19_poster.pdf

Conference program –

http://www.gwu.edu/~eall/hms/hms_19_program.pdf

Film screening poster –

http://www.gwu.edu/~eall/hms/hms_19_film.pdf

Oh Tae-suk’s works are featured on Global Shakespeares, and the event is co-organized by Global Shakespeares co-founder Alexa Huang.

On November 15, Arab world regional editor Margaret Litvin will conduct a Global Shakespeares workshop at Egypt’s National Center for Theatre, Cinema, and Folk Arts in Cairo, at the invitation of its director, Nasser Abd Elmoneim.  Titled “Egyptian Theatre Between Local Contexts and Global Audiences: Shakespeare as a Case Study,” the five-hour workshop will involve about 20 directing and drama criticism students and recent graduates from Cairo-area theatre departments. After familiarizing themselves with some goals and methods of presenting Egyptian theatre to international audiences and getting to know the Global Shakespeares web archive, participants will split into groups to analyze and annotate extracts from several Shakespeare-based Egyptian performances on the Global Shakespeares site.

The National Center for Theatre is Egypt’s leading agency for recording and compiling amateur dramatic performances, with hundreds of plays in its archive from various festivals and public and private theatres.  It is hoped that the workshop, organized in collaboration with the Center, will be a first step toward building an Egypt-based team of regular contributors of recordings and metadata for the Global Shakespeares archive.

The Edinburgh International Festival’s official drama opened on Saturday with a double dose of Shakespeare: King Lear in Mandarin and The Tempest in Korean.

Read Martin Hoyle’s review from the Financial Times.

Read the review from the Edinburgh Festival Guide.

The Global Shakespeares editors, collaborators and advisory board members have been a major presence at
the World Shakespeare Congress meeting in Prague this week, chairing 10 events,  offering 11 seminar papers and 11 talks at panels and workshops  (See previous post Global Shakespeare Scholars at Prague Conference for partial list).

The main event for our project was the Workshop on Global Shakespeares in the Digital Archive convened by Global Shakespeares Editor-in-Chief Peter Donaldson and Co-Editor Alex Huang.  At this event, attended by more than 100 Congress participants,  Donaldson and Huang presented a report on the current status of the archive, demonstrated how it can be used in research and teaching, and outlined many ways in which scholars and students can become involved in the project. Alex also offered a dynamic visual model of  how the project can function to shift academic practice toward close comparative readings of performance through the making and sharing of video sequences.

Nicholas Clary (Editor of HamletWorks and of the MLA New Variorum Edition of Hamlet) and Peter Donaldson took the audience through a tour of how the rich commentary notes and textual annotations of HamletWorks might be combined with the image and video resources of  Global Shakespeares and MIT’s Shakespeare Electronic Archive.  Choosing a single line from Hamlet that exists in two distinct forms in the early texts, they showed how in an integrated interface a user might move from that variant line to more than 50 commentary notes from the 17th to 20th centuries, through numerous illustrations and art works depicting the moment at which Hamlet comes upon the King in prayer  and has an opportunity to take revenge,  then through the corresponding moments in Olivier’s 1947 film, the Ryutopia Company’s 2007 production (in Japanese) and in Ham-Let, a Brazilian production of 1993.

Liana Leao, Anna Camati and Celia Arns, Global Shakespeares editors for Brazil gave a report on their work on the archive including video extracts from the director interviews they are conducting, and Poonam Trivedi, editor for India discussed the difficulties as well as the successes in her work on the archive, and raised theoretical issues concerning the “global,” how that term structures our current understanding of the project, and how we might make the site more international.   Discussion was intense and productive.

During the conference we have met with more than a dozen prospective future collaborators, all of whom may bring new skills, materials and perspectives to our work, and help us to extend the collections to new areas, especially Central and Eastern Europe.

View the website for the 9th World Shakespeare Conference in Prague.

The Global Shakespeare Curriculum Initiative based at MIT and supported by the School of Humanities Fund for Teaching and Learning brings together MIT faculty and collaborators from across the world to create new classes that integrate theatrical and literary approaches to Global Shakespeare using the materials of the archive as well as on-line multimedia essay tools and virtual and in-person sharing of classes.  MIT participants include: Peter Donaldson, Global Shakespeares editor, Shankar Raman (MIT Literature) author of Framing ‘India’; Diana Henderson, Dean for Curriculum and Faculty Support; Janet Sonenberg, Head of MIT Theater Arts, Jay Scheib, MIT Theater Arts Professor, internationally prominent director and Time Out‘s “Best Director in New York” for 2009.  Collaborators include Alex Huang, Global Shakespeares editor, Margaret Litvin, Boston University, Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi) and others.

MIT Profs. Donaldson, Henderson, Raman, Scheib, and Sonenberg

The editors of Global Shakespeares and collaborators in MIT’s Global Shakespeare Curricular Initiative and HamletWorks will be well represented at the World Shakespeare Conference in Prague Conference, July 16-22:

Peter S. Donaldson (MIT) will chair the panel on “The Renaissance of Shakespeare on Film,” papers by Mark Thornton Burnett, Alexander Huang (George Washington University), and Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi) and will also co-chair a workshop on “Global Shakespeare in the Digital Age” with Alexander Huang, and contribute a paper to the seminar on “Global Spin-Offs.”

Alexander Huang (George Washington University) will present a paper on Ophelia on the panel “The Renaissance  of Shakespeare on Film,”  co-lead the workshop on “Global Shakespeare in the Digital Age” with Peter Donaldson (MIT), and contribute a paper to the seminar on “Shakespeare after REED.”

Diana Henderson (MIT) will contribute a paper on “Retrospections: Women’s Sonnets, Shakespeare’s Shadow, and the Literary History of Forms” to the seminar on “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

Shankar Raman (MIT) will contribute a paper on “Infinite Finitude: Enumerating the Sonnets” to the seminar on “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

Anna Stegh Camati (UIANDRADE, Brazil) will co-chair the seminar on “Shakespearean Metamorphoses: Intermedial Transactions.”

Célia Arns de Miranda will present “Otelo da Mangueira: a Brazilian Shakespeare Adaptation in Musical Version” in the seminar “Shakespearean Metamorphoses: Intermedial, Transactions.”

Liana de Camargo Leâo (UFPR, Brazil) and Mail Marques de Azevedo (UNIANDRADE, Brazil) will contribute a paper on “Text, Performance and Film: An Intermedial Reading of Antunes Filho´s Throne of Blood/Macbeth” to the seminar on “Global Spin-Offs.”

Margaret Litvin (Boston University) will co-chair the seminar on “Shakespeare on the Arab Stage.”

Nicholas Clary ( St. Micahel’s College ), Hardin Aasand ( Dickonson State University ) and Jesus Tronch Perez (University of Valencia) will participate in the panel on “Editing Hamlet.”

“The Ninth World Shakespeare Congress in Prague will mark the next phase in a journey through four continents. Beginning in Vancouver, this international conference has travelled every five years since 1971 to share Shakespearean scholarship, performance, and pedagogy at another great site: Washington D.C., Stratford-upon-Avon, Berlin, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Valencia and Brisbane. The culturally rich city of Prague, a new setting for the Congress in central Europe, offers a wonderful opportunity to engage in dialogue about Shakespearean reception both here and throughout the world.”

Visit the 9th World Shakespeare Congress website.

There is a great article on Global Shakespeares in Gazeta do Povo, Parana Brazil, printed on April 30, 2011. Gazeta do Povo is one of the largest daily newspapers in Brazil, founded in 1919.

Many thanks to our collaborators, Profs. Liana Leão, Célia Arns de Miranda, and Anna Stegh Camati!

Brazilian professors Liana Leão, Célia Arns de Miranda, and Anna Stegh Camati.

Read the article in the Gazeta do Povo: “A Global and Virtual Shakespeare”

Global Shakespeares in the Digital Archive Co-conveners: Peter Donaldson (MIT) and Alexa Huang (Penn State, MIT)

Participants: Scholars and graduate students attending the World Shakespeare Congress.

Workshop description: The age of global Shakespeares and digital video archive is upon us, and online video research tools have become indispensable when we research and teach worldwide performances of Shakespeare. It is an age when Shakespeare and world cultures foster symbiotic and antithetical relationships with equal force. This workshop serves two purposes:

1. introduce participants to the resources, research tools and new pedagogical possibilities afforded by the MIT Global Shakespeares digital performance archive and research space located at http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/ The project provides global, regional, and national portals to Shakespeare productions within a federated archive. There are portals to Shakespeare performances in the UK and North America, the Arab World, India, Asia, and Brazil, containing full videos and video highlights.
2. work with practitioners or users of digital Shakespeare archives and participants without any experience but are curious about new pedagogical possibilities; to brainstorm about the practical and theoretical implications of a broad range of digital Shakespeare projects including video and textual archives. What can one do with these digital tools that has not been possible until now? Are there any limitations or drawbacks? What critical resources might we bring to thinking about the place of the archive in Shakespeare studies today?

For more information visit http://www.shakespeare2011.net