Global Shakespeares co-founder Alexander Huang and regional editor for the “Arab World” Margaret Litvin were recently interviewed on separate occasions by The Shakespeare Standard. These review and interviews are available online.

• Review of Global Shakespeares by Josh Magsam, The Shakespeare Standard, February 23, 2013
• Interview with Margaret Litvin by Colleen Kennedy, The Shakespeare Standard, April 6, 2013
• Interview with Alexander Huang Part One by Colleen Kennedy, The Shakespeare Standard, February 16, 2013
• Interview with Alexander Huang Part Two by Colleen Kennedy, The Shakespeare Standard, March 9, 2013

Highlights from these reviews and interviews.

Excerpt from the Review by Josh Magsam

It’s been my experience that many open-access databases and archives often suffer in terms of ease-of-use. Curation, as digital humanists are fond of repeating, is as much an art as it is a skill, and it’s clear that the staff who curate Global Shakespeares are very good at their art. Given the not-inconsiderable size of the archive, site navigation and search filtering is a snap. The main page defaults to a grid view of the database (you can select a table view if you prefer), with most recently archived entries appearing at the top.

Users can quickly filter what they see here by restricting the view to performances of specific plays, the source language of the entry or performance, or the region of origin for the performance, as well as directly search the archive. Searches can be filtered quickly and efficiently in the same screen – no backtracking to reset search parameters, just click to add or remove filters as you wish. Inside of a minute, I was able to first search for English-language performances of Hamlet staged in North America, then North American performances in any language, and finally, Arab language performance around the world. This little exercise also underscored the non-anglophile focus of the archive, as my first search returned zero hits, the second returned just one (a trailer for Mesnak, a 2003 French-Canadian film) and four Arab productions, ranging from full video of director Hani Afifi’s 2009 stage play I Am Hamlet to a brief clip of the “to be or not to be” speech from an untitled and undated production. As a bonus, Afifi’s production is accompanied by a link to a video recording of scholar Margaret Litvin’s seminar on the production, given at Cairo University.

If, like me, your primary interest in performance relates to teaching Shakespeare’s plays in the classroom, then you’ll find plenty of exciting material to work with here. The materials archived on the site are great vehicles for getting students to consider the plays outside of euro-centric norms and perspectives. Showing a few minutes of Patrick Stewart’s performance as Macbeth can be an effective way to help students think about the impact of physical gestures, the posture and proximity of one actor or actress in relation to another, the impact of enunciation and speech volume – but it won’t easily open a conversation into the cultural implications and expectations that ground many of these elements.

Excerpt from the Interview with Margaret Litvin

How do you incorporate the MIT Global Shakespeares website into your teaching?

The videos and contextual metadata on the MIT Global Shakespeares site give me the possibility and the confidence to teach productions outside my area of specialization, such as Wu Hsing-Kuo’s Lear is Here. I also rely on guest speakers a lot, calling in friends or colleagues to come introduce an area of their expertise, and I reciprocate whenever I can. Several of my colleagues at other universities are offering Global Shakespeares courses of their own, or, e.g., whole courses on Hamlet appropriation.  Does guest lecturing count as an instructional technology?  Well, it does when you do it over Skype because plane tickets are so expensive.  Another basic technology is email: I try to convince students that living authors are human and occasionally contactable.

What are the challenges to teaching Shakespeare in this globally minded way? Are there limitations to teaching Shakespeare though the lens of globalization?

The biggest limit is the length of the semester – “all the world in the time” as David Damrosch put it. Some of the students still wanted to spend more time close-reading the Shakespeare plays. Which is admirable in a way – and we did spend as much as we could.  Others wanted to spend less time on obscure (to them) twentieth-century works and more time on more “relatable” American adaptations, including more recent films like Almereyda’s very intricate Hamlet 2000 or even O (a high school basketball team Othello) and Ten Things I Hate About You. I tried to convince them they didn’t need a college seminar for those – they should have a film series on their own time.

What is your philosophy of teaching when it comes to Global Shakespeare? 

What English teachers have historically been good at is bringing in an adaptation and teaching students to “compare” it to Shakespeare’s “original.”  Humans are two-eyed beings, good at one-to-one comparisons.  As scholars and teachers, we find it easy and fruitful to look at Text B and ask how it revises Text A – or, if we’re especially enterprising, how it reflects Context X.  These interpretive and pedagogical habits are deeply engrained, because they work; they “teach well” and have yielded many productive readings.  But after all these years of talking about provincializing Europe, the binary approach still leaves us captive to a Prospero-and-Caliban model of reception and appropriation: modern writers responding, as though directly and in isolation, to the provocation of Shakespeare. I don’t have a background in an English department.  My background is in Arabic – and for the Arab world as well as many other non-Anglophone regions, this binary approach does not serve.  My book Hamlet’s Arab Journeyfocused on Egyptian theatre and identified the “global kaleidoscope” of influences – French, Italian, Russian, Eastern European, American, and other – through which the Arab reception of Shakespeare was filtered.  Unlike Caliban, modern Egyptian writers did not grow up on a cultural island, subject to a single dominant (British) cultural influence.  Like Hamlet rather than Caliban, they grew up in a world of competing authorities and would-be father figures; their cultural inheritance was multiple from the start.

Excerpt from the Interviews with Alexander Huang

Many Westerners who hear “Shakespeare” and “Asia” probably do not go beyond Kurosawa.  How can the layperson move beyond Kurosawa? Can you explain what they are missing?

Akira Kurosawa is a master filmmaker, visual artist, and storyteller, which is why his Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985) are so popular. However, his postwar film versions of Macbeth and King Lear are not the earliest or the only Shakespeare films from East Asia. There is much more to Asian interpretations of Shakespeare than Kurosawa, on stage and screen, in manga, fiction, painting, and many other genres. In Japan, Yukio Ninagawa’s widely toured productions are a staple at international venues and festivals.

There are a few performances and films that can take you beyond Kurosawa. Check out these gorgeous adaptations.

The Banquet, or Legend of the Black Scorpion, dir. FENG Xiaogang (China, 2006)

This martial-arts feature film in Mandarin Chinese gives Gertrude and Ophelia, traditionally silenced women characters in Hamlet, a strong presence, though the centrality of the Gertrude figure in the film’s narrative has been seen as problematic by some critics. As a bold period epic, the film is informed by rich intertextual traces of diverse themes from Shakespearean and Chinese sources.

The Tempest, dir. OH Tae-suk (Edinburgh, U.K., and Seoul, Korea, 2011 and 2012)

Renowned South Korean stage director and playwright Oh Tae-suk mounted his version of The Tempest to critical acclaim in Edinburgh. His production offers, among other creative twists, a two-headed Caliban played by two talented actors in a suit with a pouch. Recast as a vexed character capable of recognizing his own limitations, Prospero was often challenged by the spiky-haired Miranda and worked closely with Ariel, a shaman, to manage domestic affairs. Ariel sometimes assumed a motherly role to augment the aging father’s tenuous relationship with his teenage daughter. The production deliberately avoided the tired allegory of colonialism that has often been associated with The Tempest in modern times. The performance ended on a high note. Instead of a staff and books—symbols of authority and the archival source of knowledge in an ontological sense—Prospero carried a folding bamboo fan (hapjukseon)—a symbol of artistry and intellectualism—when he was not at the drum.  The folding fan is an integral part of a gentleman’s accessories and is a more versatile prop and powerful symbol than books.

Are there geo-political areas where it seems Shakespeare has little or no significance? What are the limits of Global Shakespeares?

There are countries and regions in the world where Shakespeare does not figure prominently in their local cultural history. From a collector’s point of view, this is archival silence. Archival silence is useful because it compels us to rethink our criteria, frame of reference, and historiographical assumptions. For example, while post-colonial critics commonly privilege works that critique the role of Western hegemony in the historical record of globalization, the meanings of Shakespeare today are not always determined by post-colonial vocabulary or the discourses of globalization.

Well, I am disappointed, and relieved at the same time, by the fact that there are no significant “Shakespeare traditions” in the Antarctic, Greenland, or large swaths of Sub-Saharan Africa (save for South Africa). The lack of a coherent, constructed Shakespeare tradition does not mean there are no local engagements with Shakespearean material. Artistic, political, and scholarly traditions of Shakespeare in any given location should be understood in different frameworks. While there are rich references and allusions to Shakespeare and his characters in Mexican cinema, there is no local scholarly tradition of Shakespeare studies, according to Alfredo Michel Modenessi who serves on our advisory board (of Global Shakespeares).

Global Shakespeares as a critical concept and a research project have changed how we think about Shakespeare’s legacy and Shakespeare’s place in different cultural marketplaces around the world. However, “global Shakespeare” as a concept is limited—though simultaneously energized — by the competing pull of tendencies to privilege local over macro-histories, and “global Shakespeare” as a project reveals multiple geographical areas where there are no significant “Shakespeare traditions.”

Can you do a few top essential global Shakespeare productions (available for viewing)? 

The Speaker’s Progress, dir. Sulayman Al-Bassam (2011), inspired by Twelfth Night, in Arabic and English with English subtitles with multimedia

• A “retired” theatre director is sent abroad with a troupe of “envoys” to defend the image of their unnamed totalitarian homeland, which has banned all theatre. They present a localized Gulf Arab version of Twelfth Night.   – from Margaret Litvin’s review of the production in Boston

Titus, dir. Julie Taymor (1999)

• Smart interweaving of different historical periods and modes of signification. Apocalyptic humor. A must see and a major milestone in Shakespearean cinema.

Romeu e Julieta by Grupo Galpão, dir. Gabriel Villela (1992), performed at the London Globe in Brazilian Portuguese

• Mix of comedy and tragedy, and formal and street-theatre presentational elements. Stilts, songs, and a carnivalesque atmosphere. What’s not to like?

Lear Is Here, dir. and perf. WU Hsing-kuo (2001), solo Beijing opera semi-autobiographical performance with English subtitles.

• The Taiwan-based Beijing opera actor plays 10 roles including his alter ego on stage. This is a visually stunning and intellectually refreshing story of an Asian actor’s soul searching and his engagement with one of the most profound Shakespearean tragedies.

 It is easy to incorporate the issues of global Shakespeare or globalization into the standard Shakespeare course.

Global Shakespeare as a curricular component answers the competing demands of internationalizing education to prepare our next generation for a complex world and of sustaining traditional canons. There are many ways to incorporate issues of politics, reception, and aesthetics raised by global Shakespeare into standard undergraduate Shakespeare courses.

Teach the blessing and curse of globalization and localization in conjunction with Shakespeare. Teach familiar texts in strange settings. As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel reminds us, what is “well known” is never properly known simply because, well, they appear to be well known, which is why Folger Shakespeare Library research director David Schalkwyk once said that unless you have read Shakespeare in another language, you do not really understand Shakespeare.

Here are some possibilities.

(1) Reading Shakespeare in multilingual contexts is important. Consider for example these lines from Macbeth: “The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.” The repetition of ‘incarnadine’ and ‘red’ is serendipitous, but the deliberate alternation between the Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) and the Latinate words suggests two pathways to and two perspectives on the world.

(2) Different cultural frameworks and translations slow us down and compel us to rethink what we assume to be familiar. Performances in world cultures can lead us back to Shakespeare’s plays with new insight and new paths for interpretation. Works such as Ong Keng Sen’s transnational and pan-Asian productions (Search: Hamlet, Lear, Desdemona, Lear Dreaming), Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It with a strong Japanese motif, and Tim Supple’s multilingual Midsummer Night’s Dream with an all-Indian and Shri Lankan cast, are generating extraordinary artistic and intellectual energy by recasting gender, racial and social identities. The racial issue disappears by being recast as uneasy familial relations in Japanese interpretations of Othello, and it is made hauntingly present through its absence from radically localized, colorblind, Korean performances that seek to redress the wound of Japanese colonization. In the Chinese tradition of performing The Merchant of Venice as romantic comedy, the play is often retooled as an adventure of an attractive woman lawyer or an outlandish tale involving a pound of human flesh.  This framework has activated elements of the play that, over several centuries of Anglo-European readings, have become obscure to communities that gravitate towards the ethics of conversion as a key site of tension in the narrative. Other examples of reconfigurations of the center and the periphery abound. These works have led to the transformation of traditions occurring in both directions at once.

(3) It is important to appreciate the historicity of global Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon that is not exclusive to the modern era. Translation was an unalienable part of the cultural life in early modern England. Translation, or translatio, signifying “the figure of transport,” was a common rhetorical trope that referred to the conveyance of ideas from one geo-cultural location to another, from one historical period to another, and from one artistic form to another. London witnessed a steady stream of merchants and foreign emissaries from Europe, the Barbary coast, and the Mediterranean, and thousands of Dutch and Flemish Protestants fled to Kent in the late 1560s due to the Spanish persecution. Within Shakespeare’s plays, the figure of translation looms large.

Henry V contains several instances of literal translation, including the language lesson scene and the well-known wooing scene. Translation serves as a figure of transport, theft, transfer of property, and change across linguistic and national boundaries, as the characters and audience are ferried back and forth across the Channel. The “broken English” (5.2.228) in the light-hearted scene symbolises Henry V’s dominance over Catherine and France after the English victory at the Battle of Agincourt. However, the Epilogue reminds us that the marriage is far from a closure (Epilogue 12), for it produces a son who is “half-French, half-English” (5.2.208). The English conqueror pretends to be a wooer to Catherine of France who cannot reject him freely. One is unsure whether Catherine is speaking the truth that she does not understand English well enough (“I cannot tell”) or just being coy—playing Harry’s game, though Catherine eventually yields to Henry V’s request: “Dat is as it shall please de roi mon père” (5.2.229). A play such as Henry V and its global afterlife (for example, Laurence Olivier’s film version during World War II as propaganda) provide rich material to be mined to teach various aspects of international relations and to further students’ understanding of Shakespearean aesthetics.

(4) If you have a diverse classroom, take advantage of students’ different backgrounds and experiences. Turn international students who are not native speakers of English into your asset. All too often they are seen as a liability, but their linguistic and cultural repertoire should be tapped to build a sustainable intellectual community. Take The Tempest for example. What exactly do Prospero and Miranda teach Caliban? The word “language” is ambiguous in act 1 scene 2 (Caliban: “You taught me language …”). It is often taken to mean his master’s language (a symbol of oppression). But it can also mean a new tool for him to change the world order. One way to excavate the different layers of meanings within the play and in performances is to compare different stage and film versions from different parts of the world. Students can even try to translate a passage and share their rationale with the class. Caliban’s “language” is translated variously in different languages. In Mandarin Chinese it is rendered as “human language”, 語言, as opposed to languages of the animal or a different system of signification. Christoph Martin Wieland translates the word in German as redden, or “speech”. Caliban may know how to curse in his own language before Prospero takes over his island, but he now has one more language in his arsenal.

Take another word from The Tempest. Prospero announces in act 4 scene 1 that “our revels now are ended.” The word “revels” in the Elizabethan context refers to royal festivities and stage entertainments, but it carries different diagnostic significance in translation. Christoph Martin Wieland used Spiele (plays) and Schauspieler (performer) to refer to Prospero’s masque and actors (“Unsre Spiele sind nun zu Ende” in German). Sometimes translators working in the same language have different interpretations. Liang Shiqiu translated it as “games” in Mandarin Chinese in 1964, alluding to the manipulative Prospero’s “games” on the island, but Zhu Shenghao preferred “carnivals” (1954), highlighting the festive nature of the wedding celebration.

Act 1 Scene 3 of Othello offers another interesting instance (which is the focus of Tom Cheeseman’s Version Variation Visualization: Multi-Lingual Crowd Sourcing of Shakespeare’s Othello):

 If virtue no delighted beauty lack,

Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

Translations of these lines into different languages deal with the meanings of “fair” and “black” rather differently. Mikhail Lozinskij’s Russian translation says “Since honor is a source of light of virtue, / Then your son-in-law is light, and by no means black.” Christopher Martin Wieland and Ángel Luis Pujante used white in German and Spanish (respectively) to translate “fair,” while Victor Hugo chose “shining.” It’s eye opening to see how translation opens up the text in new ways.

(5) Class units can be designed around watching videos on Global Shakespeares and discussing the English subtitles. It is eye opening for students to experience Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech in languages other than English. The vague, versatile, and “Swiss-knife” verb “to be” is as ambiguous in English as it is in many other languages. Sometimes it is translated as “to have” (but to have or not to have what!?), to do, to die, and so on. Go to this page to listen to the speeches.

There you will find “to be or not to be” in several languages drawn from actual performances:

• English [Gielgud Hamlet]
• Arabic [Sobhi Hamlet]
• Assamese (Indian dialect) [Hazarika Hamlet]
• Brazilian Portuguese [Correa Hamlet]
• Japanese [Kurita Hamlet]
• Korean [Yohangza Hamlet]
• Mandarin [Hamlet Unplugged]
• Swedish [Lyth Hamlet]

(6) One can also build into a Twelfth Night unit issues of gender, world cultures, and Shakespearean performance. Japanese is a language more complex than English from a sociolinguistic point of view. Performing the play in Japanese is therefore a challenge. One would have to wrestle with more than 20 first- and second-person pronouns to maintain the ambiguity and subtlety of gender identities. In addition to making the right choice of employing the familiar or polite style based on the relation between the speaker and the addressee, the male and female speakers of Japanese are each confined to gender-specific personal pronouns at their disposal. Before a translation can be undertaken, decisions will have to be made on the register and gendered expressions to convey Orsino’s comments about love from a male perspective and Viola’s apology for a woman’s love when in disguise as Cesario, or the exchange between Rosalind in disguise as Ganymede and Oliver on her “lacking a man’s heart” when she swoons, nearly giving herself away (4.3.164-176). But limitations create new linguistic and cultural opportunities. Translational moments like this can launch interesting discussions about visible and invisible gender identities in Twelfth Night.

(7) Interdisciplinarity. Global Shakespeare is a great topic for inquiry-driven learning. It is often assumed that materials to be presented in the undergraduate classroom have to be dumbed down, and that students will be overwhelmed by interdisciplinary approaches. The opposite is true. Students love a hands-on approach to create and share knowledge, to build on existing theories to explore new frontiers. As a broad field, global Shakespeare allows students to make fresh contributions. Beyond Global Shakespeares, many other archives can help students make transhistorical connections between issues and build cross-cultural understanding of arts. For example, Early English Books Online (EEBO), and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s LUNA.

Cristiane Busato Smith, one of the Global Shakespeares Regional Editors for Brazil, has written an article on the theater troupe Nós do Morro.

Here is an excerpt:

Nós do Morro (Us from the Hillside) is a community based theatre company and school based in the Vidigal Morro, one of the largest favelas (shanty towns) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Perched on a hillside overlooking the rich districts of Leblon and Ipanema, with fantastic views of the Atlantic Ocean, is the house where Nós do Morro has trained actors, technicians and other art professionals. Founded in 1986, it has over 350 participants, among them children, youngsters and adults who reside in the Vidigal Morro. In over twenty-five years, most of which relying on their meager finances, Nós do Morro consolidated its roots in the heart of Vidigal while also achieving recognition nationally and internationally.

Nós do Morro was founded by a group of friends inspired by the dream of journalist Guti Fraga, who wanted to create a cultural movement in the Vidigal community, similar to the ones he had seen in Harlem, New York. His idea was to use the local talent to portray the rich universe of the favela and create work of excellence. His conviction in the transformative power of art is clear in his successful history with Nós do Morro. As Fraga explains: “The only way to change stereotypes is through quality. That is the only way. One word that I don’t want near my work is pity. Pity is an ugly word. It makes the pitier feel better and the pitied feel worse. So you have to break through that emotion with quality, first and always.”

Click here to read the full article.

by Scott L. Newstok

Originally published in http://www.smartcitymemphis.com/2012/10/11228/

To see Symposium poster, click here.

“Globalization” has now been a buzzword for over half a century. Whether one valorizes or villifies the notion, it’s often presumed that the process of globalization is moving us inexorably toward world-wide interconnectedness. But as the University of Memphis’ Wanda Rushing has argued, globalization is rarely uniform. Instead, it often involves a peculiar, sometimes contradictory tension between international and local dynamics. Rushing’s book, Memphis and the Paradox of Place, explores how our city retains its regional roots even as it increasingly engages with a networked global economy.

The Memphis business community certainly prides itself on being a crossroads of international commerce. Our airport ranks second in the world in terms of annual tonnage, leading Globe Trade magazine to give Memphis top honors for “Best Logistics Infrastructure” in its recent list of Top 50 Cities for Global Trade. In 2011, Memphis conferences focused on topics such as global interdependence in food markets and the emergence of global airport cities. The latter was part of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce’s renewed emphasis on rebranding ourselves “America’s Aerotropolis,” as Smart City has previously discussed.

In addition to being a global commercial crossroads, we’re also a global cultural crossroads. Well-attended festivals range from the longstanding Memphis in May and Africa in April to the more recent Global Lens Film series, the International Guitar Festival, and other celebrations supported by local immigrant communities. Colleges of Memphis encourage study with a global focus: see the Buckman Center for International Education at Rhodes; the Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training (MHIRT) at CBU; and the Wang Center for International Business, Education, and Research (CIBER) at the University of Memphis.

That complex local/global tension identified by Rushing happens to be an apt way to think of the figure of Shakespeare. Here’s a writer who was locally embedded in his 16^th century Warwickshire youth and his London adulthood. Yet during Shakespeare’s lifetime Renaissance Europe was already experiencing an early version of globalization. As the current British Museum exhibition demonstrates, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were clearly “staging the world” as accelerating mercantile and cultural exchange leading to a new awareness of that global/local tension.

Over nearly four centuries since his death, Shakespeare has grown into a worldwide, wildly malleable icon. Nowhere is this malleability more evident than in an overly-familiar play like Hamlet. The 17^th century already saw a comically abbreviated version circulating in Germany, with slapstick pratfalls. By the 18^th century there were French, Russian, Hungarian, Spanish, Polish, and Dutch translations of the play being performed across Europe. Notable actors chose to omit characters and entire scenes; women were cast in the lead role; editors struggled to come to terms with conflicting versions published during Shakespeare’s lifetime. (So much for the fantasy of fidelity to a playwright’s supposedly original intentions!) This ongoing process of cultural mobility manifested itself last summer in London, where alongside the Olympic games, a multi-lingual Shakespearean marathon took place: 37 plays were performed in 37 different languages for the “Globe to Globe” project, part of the World Shakespeare Festival.

A bit of that global energy arrives on our local Memphis stage this Friday. On October 5, a group of world-renowned Shakespeareans will come to Rhodes College to discuss Hamlet across the globe. “Global Hamlets” will be our fourth free public symposium supported by the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment, a unique fund devoted to supporting Shakespeare studies. Invited speakers include the creator of the “Global Shakespeares” online performance archive (Alexander Huang); the research director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, (David Schalkwyk); a leading scholar of Shakespeare in the Arab world (Margaret Litvin); and an artist who has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company (Nick Hutchison—the visiting director for our April 2013 As You Like It production). All will be exploring Hamlet’s fascinating transformations in modern-day Arab, British, Chinese, and South African contexts. As with our prior Shakespeare symposia—on race, environmental studies, and the King James Bible—this broadly interdisciplinary topic has been generously supported by a wide range of Rhodes programs: Asian Studies, British Studies at Oxford, English, International Studies, Search, and Theatre. And Memphis happily boasts a number of scholars who have engaged with issues of Shakespeare and translation via French, German, and Indian versions.

To provide a performance-based perspective on global Hamlets, Rhodes will screen the 2006 Chinese film The Banquet, a Kung Fu Hamlet adaptation (Thursday, October 4, 7:30pm, Blount Auditorium); Opera Memphis will perform the baritone aria from Ambroise Thomas’ French grand opera Hamlet (at the reception following our October 5 symposium); and the Rhodes Singers fall concert will include Shakespearean words set to music (Sunday, October 21, 3:30pm, St. Anne Catholic Church). As it happens, the Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s current show, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), focuses on Hamlet during its last satirical half hour—and their spring production at the Dixon Gallery will be Hamlet.

Speakers have been encouraged to make their brief presentations accessible to a general audience, with plenty of time devoted to informal discussion. We’ve heard that attendees will include juniors and seniors from Ridgeway’s International Baccalaureate program, and even a high school English teacher flying in from Pasadena, as she’s planning a course on this very topic. This symposium is also attracting Renaissance scholars from around the region, including the co-director of the Conference on John Milton at MTSU, the co-founder of the World Shakespeare Project at Emory University, and the director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa.

Please join this audience for “Global Hamlets,” which seeks to take a play you have long thought familiar, and make it richly unfamiliar again.

Global Shakespeares regional editor Margaret Litvin and co-founder and co-director Alexander Huang will speak on Arab and Chinese Hamlets at the “Global Hamlets” event at Rhodes College, Memphis, on October 5, 2012.

http://www.rhodes.edu/shakespeare/24761.asp

Friday, October 5, 2012 (1-5pm, Blount Auditorium)

A free public symposium exploring adaptations and appropriations of Hamlet across the globe, in Arab, British, Chinese, and South African contexts. Event organized by Scott Newstok.

Pre-registration is encouraged to assure seating: alumni.rhodes.edu/hamlet

Media: Download poster (PDF).

Speakers:

• Alexander Huang (George Washington University); BBC interviews here and here; “Multilingual Shakespeare“; “Borrowed Robes”

• Nick Hutchison (RADA)

• Margaret Litvin (Boston University)

• David Schalkwyk (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Performances:

• “The Banquet” (aka Legend of the Black Scorpion, dir. FENG Xiaogang, China, 2006), a Kung Fu adaptation, to be screened Thursday, October 4, 7:30pm, Blount Auditorium

• Baritone aria from Ambroise Thomas′ French grand opera Hamlet, performed by Opera Memphis at the reception following our October 5 symposium

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), performed by the Tennessee Shakespeare Company (September 20-October 7, Poplar Pike Playhouse); tickets for the October 5 performance subsidized for members of the Rhodes community by CODA: The Center for Outreach in the Development of the Arts

• The Poet′s Heart, the Composer′s Pen: Music set to writings of great poets, performed by Rhodes Singers, Chamber Singers, Women′s Chorus and Men′s Chorus (Sunday, October 21, 3:30pm, St. Anne Catholic Church)

On May 30, 2012 Dr Joshua Edelman and Dr Aneta Mancewicz, research fellows at Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, conducted a workshop entitled ‘Watching the Watching of Shakespeare’ at The Ends of Audience Conference at Queen Mary, University of London. Mancewicz is a Global Shakespeares regional editor for Europe.

At the center of a large room, there were four computers connected to projectors and speakers. The computers were linked to the Global Shakespeares archive, with projections of selected clips from the archive on four screens around the room. The effect was that of a visual and aural cacophony of Shakespearean images, all of which were artifacts of performance but many of which might have seemed incomprehensible or odd, due to the multiplicity of languages and performance styles.

Edelman and Mancewicz took turns posing questions over a microphone to the participating audience. There were two sets of four videos with approximately thirty questions for each set. They asked, for instance, which performance the participants best understood, which they found most interesting and which most frightening. The questions moved from the more objective and emotionally neutral to the highly subjective and personal. After each question, participants indicated their choice by physically assembling around one image. The physical moving was negotiated by the group, and the nature of the answers was conveyed both by the size of each group and its behavior. The room was loud enough that verbal discussion amongst participants was difficult, so the dynamics of inter-audience relationships was expressed kinesthetically.

After the questions, the projections and sound were turned off, and the participants were engaged in a group discussion on the audience dynamics and the global nature of Shakespeare performance and research. They were asked, for instance, what was the perceived difference between the video-mediated performance of Shakespeare and the live actions of the audience members. What motivated their choices? To what extent did they feel influenced in their answers by the people around them? The workshop made visible the group pressure and the negotiation of individual opinions by drawing on the global and historical breadth of Shakespearean performance that is available on the Global Shakespeares archive.

Romeo and Juliet East and West.

To celebrate the “cosmopolitan” 2012 London Olympics, British festival organizers invited performers from around the world to showcase their works. Shown in this photo is an actor from China’s Zhejiang Kunju Troupe walking down Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon where the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is located. They performed the Peony Pavilion (1598), a play often regarded as the Chinese Romeo and Juliet.

Global Shakespeares editors for Brazil — Liana de Camargo Leão, Anna Stegh Camati, and Cris Busato Smith — traveled to Boston last month to attend the 2012 Shakespeare Association of America conference. During their stay, Liana, Anna, and Cris visited the MIT team and worked closely with us to brainstorm and plan for the expansion of the Brazil regional portal within Global Shakespeares. Here are a few English subtitled video clips they have produced. (more…)