On Friday, May 10, 2013, the FSA will host a very exciting panel at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair!

Buenos Aires International Book Fair

At 2:30 pm, May 10, a panel of distinguished speakers will speak on “Shakespeare entre todos”.

The Argentinian Director Rubén Szuchmacher and Horacio Peña (Henry IV Part 2) who played Falsttaf at the London Globe in 2012 will talk about their experience at the World Shakespeare Festival.

Mr. Szuchmacher, director of the production of Rey Lear, and Mr Peña who played Kent in that production, will share their experience with Shakespeare.

For more information and future FSA news, please visit:

http://www.shakespeareargentina.org/FSA/news.html

• 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.

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.

The event examined the role of Hamlet on Eastern European stages after 1989. It addressed the legacy of Jan Kott’s political interpretation of the play that saw it as a struggle of an individual against a corrupt government. Such an understanding of Hamlet resonated with theatre makers across post-war socialist Europe. The symposium sought to inquire into the significance of this tragedy in New Europe, through examination of its theatrical and cinematic representations.

1)      According to Jan Kott, Hamlet in socialist Europe had the potential to mirror and challenge socio-political circumstances from a relatively safe position of a cultural icon; has the function of this seminal text changed after the fall of the Iron Curtain?

2)      What are new approaches to staging Hamlet after the shift in social-political circumstances in 1989?

3)      Is there still an identifiable phenomenon of the ‘Eastern European Hamlet’ in the so-called ‘New Europe’? Are there common political and aesthetic approaches among Eastern European theatre makers? Have Eastern European countries forged their own styles of interpreting Hamlet?

Prof. Robin Nelson, head of Research at Central, opened the event and chaired the symposium. Dr. Duška Radosavljević from University of Kent and Alexandra Portmann M.A., from University of Berne and University of Kent introduced the theme of the symposium and the speakers.

The five presentations during the symposium focused on performative, political, historical, and cultural aspects of post-1989 Hamlet productions from Romania, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Serbia.

Dr. Nicoleta Cinpoes, University of Worcester
“‘Who’s there?’: Hamlet and Romania in the New Millennium”

Dr. Aneta Mancewicz , The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London and Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland
“A Bittersweet Prince: Hamlet in the 21^st Century Poland”

Dr. Márta Minier, Drama at the University of Glamorgan
“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed … Something Golden”: Post-1989 Hungarian Hamlets

Dr. Sonia Massai, King’s College London
“Nekrosius’s Hamlet at the Globe to Globe Festival”

Dr. Duška Radosavljević, University of Kent /Alexandra Portmann M.A., University of Berne and University of Kent
“Serbian Hamlet meets Fortinbras from Yorkshire”

The presentations were followed by a discussion among the presenters and an open Q&A session with questions from the audience. Most importantly, the discussion concerned:

-          the continued significance of Hamlet for Eastern European nations,

-          the diminishing role of Fortinbras in Eastern European productions,

-          the analogies on the level of dramaturgy and the use of media in Eastern European performances of Hamlet,

-          the growth of individual perspectives in Eastern European countries, manifested in the variety of approaches and styles of staging Hamlet, post-1989,

-          the popularity of other Shakespeare’s plays and other classic playwrights in Eastern Europe,

-          different perceptions of what  “Eastern Europe” means for the East and the West,

-          the increasing role of globalisation and universalism in interpretations of Shakespeare.

The event offered a wide range of perspectives to the presence of Hamlet in Eastern Europe. Considering the breadth of the topic, it was, however, inevitable that the discussion could not answer all the points raised during the panel. It is, thus, hoped that there will be a follow-up event on that subject in the near future.

Full text available at: http://web.mit.edu/acyhuang/www/Publications/HuangTS2013.pdf

“What Country, Friends, Is This?”: Multilingual Shakespeare on Festive Occasions

Alexander Huang

Touring theatre is a place where theatre studies and globalization come into contact. The year of 2012 was a year of global festivities in which Shakespeare’s works played a major part. Through their exemplary power, the intersections of world cultures and Shakespeare provide a set of important issues for repositioning theatre studies in the wider field of globalization studies.

How does Shakespeare make world theatre legible in the British context? What roles have “foreign” performance styles played in the rise of Shakespearean theatre as a “global” genre and to post-imperial British identity in the world? More specifically, what does it entail for international touring theatre artists to perform Shakespeare in Britain and for the British press to judge these touring productions?

Some answers to these questions can be found in the patterns of production and reception of Shakespeare in postnational spaces—festival venues where national identities are blurred by the presence of such entities as transnational corporate sponsors. Some of the touring theatre works in 2012 were produced under circumstances that may prove challenging or alienating to even the most cosmopolitan audiences. Shakespeare in the diaspora puts pressure on some of the theoretical models theatre historians have privileged in their documentation of the Western sources of non-Western performances.

In particular, the reception of touring performances is informed by issues of politics, language, and performantive cultural affiliations.

First, the cultural and political conditions of a venue or a production intervene in reception and undercut the work of artistic intent. This genre of stage works is shaped by forms of agency that are not rooted in intentionality.

Second, in Shakespearean performance, language is often granted more agency than the materiality of performance, leading to the tendency to privilege certain modernized and editorialized versions of Shakespearean scripts and their accurate reproduction in foreign-language performances. The humanities over the past century have witnessed the so-called linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, and the cultural turn, all of which operate on assumptions about the substantial and substantializing power of language as opposed to the materiality of cultural representation. As opposed to other forms of embodiment, language as a marker is deeply ingrained in identity politics. Language is a tool of empowerment to create solidarity, but it can also be divisive at international festivals where audience members who do not have access to the immediacy of the spoken language on stage might feel alienated or excluded.

Third, Shakespeare productions that tour to the United Kingdom reflect shifting locational terrains of performative meanings that—unlike nationalist imaginations of Shakespeare—do not always correspond to the performers’ and audiences’ cultural affiliations. The systemic mutations in the politics of cultural production and compression of time and space engender variegated, layered subject positions. Directors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who tour their works to the U.K. often make revisions to accommodate the performance space and audiences of international festivals, dictated by the cultural prestige of the exporting nation. In contrast, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)—occupying a more privileged position in the Shakespearean circle—does not usually localize its productions for the purpose of international tours (e.g., Loveday Ingram’s The Merchant of Venice, starring Ian Bartholomew, in Beijing and Shanghai, 2002).

“As Huge as High Olympus”

Organizers of the 2012 London Olympics and the Cultural Olympiad proclaimed Shakespeare, once again, the bearer of universal currency. Much more ambitious than the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2006 Complete Works festival, the 2012 Globe-to-Globe (part of World Shakespeare Festival) was an integral part of the Cultural Olympiad to celebrate the Olympics. The festival was presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the EIF, and the Globe to Globe program. Opened on 21 April, it brought theatre companies from many parts of the world to perform Shakespeare in their own languages (“37 plays in 37 languages”; Fig. 3) “in [the London] Globe, within the architecture Shakespeare wrote for.” In fact, thirty-eight Shakespearean plays were performed in languages ranging from Lithuanian to sign language. This is arguably one of the most important festivals since David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 that jump-started the Shakespeare industry and tourism in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The World Shakespeare Festival, unlike the previous RSC Complete Works Festival, included almost exclusively non-English-language performances. The WSF also made an effort to cover Africa, the Americas, Russia, Asia, Europe, and New Zealand. In terms of geographical distribution during the WSF, European companies alone offered fifteen touring productions to the festival including British Sign Language performances. Asian companies offered eight productions (not counting the Maori Troilus and Cressida), African companies six, and Middle Eastern companies six. Groups from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the US also brought productions to the WSF.

Both the Olympics and the Globe’s festival focused on participants from many nations and on brands in promotional efforts. The parallels between sports and performance have been explored in various studies. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht attributes the fascination with watching sports to a very literal sense of aesthetic experience, namely the nature of athletic beauty. J. P. Singh argues in Globalized Arts that “creative products” can be incorporated into local and global markets to address cultural discomfort and anxieties about globalization. Some visiting companies and audience members who spoke the languages the companies used in their productions saw the festival at the Globe as an opportunity to assert identity.

Both the Olympic Games and the Cultural Olympiad share a common goal of promoting mutual understanding among countries, but they also fuel nationalism in various guises. Despite the London Globe’s effort to market the international Shakespeare productions by focusing on the languages of the plays and the cities of origin of the companies rather than their countries (e.g., a Hebrew Merchant of Venice from Tel Aviv; The Comedy of Errors from Kabul), national flags appeared online and were brought onstage while enthusiastic crowds of expatriates cheered on. Similar to international sporting events, the multicultural celebration of languages inevitably fueled nationalist sentiments in various guises that ranged from political protests to celebration of independence.

For instance, a 12 × 4.5-inch image of a crowd waving flags of the Republic of South Sudan (est. 2011) adorns the Globe’s Web page advertising the South Sudan Theatre Company’s Cymbeline in Juba Arabic. At the curtain call of Dhaka Theatre’s Tempest at the Globe on 8 May 2012, one of the actors reappeared onstage wrapped in the Bangladeshi flag. The gesture connected an artistic achievement with national pride. More controversial were the street demonstration outside the Globe Theatre and calls to boycott the Israeli company Habima’s performance of The Merchant of Venice.

Boomerang Shakespeare Comes Home

Prominent in the marketing language of the World Shakespeare Festival (of which Globe to Globe was a part) was Viola’s aforementioned question in Twelfth Night, now made rhetorical: “What country, friends, is this?” appears with an image of a marooned ship on the WSF’s website to advertise the RSC’s “shipwreck trilogy” (The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest) and to serve as a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the deliciously confusing festival.  The idea seems to be that if each country’s artists fully embody the essence of their culture, the audience would be able to tell which country it is at first blush.

The Q Brother’s ninety-minute hip hop Othello: The Remix was invited to represent the U.S. at the Globe. Set in modern-day U.S., the story about the reigning king of hip hop was acted and narrated by a cast of four men in jumpsuits, with a DJ up in the balcony. The production was among the first show to be sold out, and attracted a large number of young audiences.

There were moments in several productions when questions about cultural and geopolitical identities ceased to be rhetorical and became pressing in a productive way. The Belarus Free Theatre’s production of King Lear was refreshing and challenging, partly because few audience members were familiar with Belarus and its culture. The facetious performance treated the play as a comic folktale that spirals into tragedy. Lear wobbled onstage with a thatch of white hair atop his slender frame, only to throw off the wig and reveal his jovial self. The play did not seem to need a Fool. The division-of-the-kingdom scene was presented as something akin to a reality TV show involving a rival striptease among the daughters. It is a different story with other troupes.

One of the contributions of touring productions and theatrical contingency is that Viola’s question will be asked with increasing urgency and will prompt more reflections on cultural identities that have been taken for granted. “Shakespeare” is a canon that is supposedly familiar to educated English speakers, but it is increasingly alien to the younger generation. If the Belarusian Lear estranged Shakespeare in linguistic and artistic terms, the hip hop Othello made Shakespeare more familiar and relevant. Thus, the Globe to Globe seasons and other similarly structured festivals including Edinburgh International Festival and the Barbican International Theatre Events pitched Shakespeare as global celebrity against Shakespeare as national poet and created a new brand with contemporary currency and vitality.

What is left unarticulated, however, is how foreign Shakespeares have been deployed to validate and elevate the status of English Shakespeare performances, especially at a venue such as the London Globe.

Working with and against the Surtitles

Festival organizers have a curatorial function in bringing together and presenting works by diverse groups. Touring Shakespeare productions share some features with international spectator sports; both require international travel, both are capable of garnering media attention, and both thrive on the unpredictability of the outcome. The theatre audience is simultaneously an outsider (to the foreign style) and an insider (familiar with certain aspects of Shakespeare).

Festivals and special events have played an important role in bringing touring productions to London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Edinburgh, and other U.K. cities. In 1994, the Barbican Theatre hosted a festival entitled Everybody’s Shakespeare that offered performances by the Comédie-Française (Paris), the Suzuki Company of Toga, Tel Aviv’s Itim Theatre Ensemble, Moscow’s Detsky Theatre, and the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Of interest is how the organizers turned Shakespeare on tour into “consumable chunks of popular culture” in a workshop of metonymic equivalences (the cherry blossom for Japan, drumming for Africa, the carnival for Brazil, and so on). As is the case with many touring productions, the reception of this festival was characterized by conflicting strands of what Peter Holland has aptly summarized as “xenophobic suspicion at the sheer unEnglishness of the work” and cultural elitism that assumes that the novelty of Shakespeare in Japanese is superior to English Shakespeare conventions. For some critics, the language barrier proved to be an insurmountable obstacle, as Charles Spencer commented: “There we sit, following [the] surtitles while listening to the performers delivering the matchless poetry in an incomprehensible tongue.” He wrote with a sense of national pride, and many critics operated under a similar assumption of cultural exclusivity, though few voiced their disapproval in such a radical form.

During the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012, the Globe devised a strategy to divert attention away from the surtitles to the action onstage and applied it uniformly to all of the productions in different languages. The purpose was to remove language as a distraction, if not an obstacle, in order to allow for certain degree of improvisation. One obvious limitation is that the architectural space of the Globe is not ideal for line-by-line surtitles because of the pillars and the thrust stage. Only short summaries of the scene—written by the Globe staff in consultation with the visiting companies—were projected on the two screens next to the stage. According to Tom Bird, the synopsis surtitles were meant to avoid the elitism associated with line-by-line translations of Shakespearean texts. The plot summaries are based on Shakespeare’s script most of the time rather than performative choices or improvisational elements. Obviously no synopsis can be neutral whether it is based on narrative or dramaturgical structure, because it involves interpretive acts.

As the actors worked with and against the surtitles, the synopsis surtitles redirected the audience’s attention to the tension between the plot and dramaturgical structures. In the Mandarin Richard III, short English phrases were inserted by actors playing the two murderers for more immediate comic effect. In another production, the actors mocked the surtitles. The audiences were told not to trust what was being projected “up there.” Such moments of textual resistance became more noticeable through the synopsis surtitles.

Some touring or intercultural productions were seen as showcases for the exotic beauty of unfamiliar performance traditions for cultural elites. Targeting audiences who are bored by an overworked Shakespeare through the education system, these productions are not for purists. A few strands dominate in the narratives surrounding this type of productions, ranging from celebration of other cultures’ reverence of Shakespeare (e.g., the “Shakespeare Is German” season at the London Globe in 2010) to suspicion about delightful but bewildering (for the press at least) productions that are fully indigenized.

The Globe has played host to numerous such productions, and the RSC often sets English-language performances by British actors in non-British locations. Directors face a dilemma, as they are caught between pursuing authenticity and “selling out.” For example, the RSC’s recent English-language productions of two plays, one Chinese and the other Shakespearean, have reignited debates about cultural authenticity.

The first is Gregory Doran’s adaptation of Orphan of Zhao with an almost exclusively white cast of seventeen. British actors of East Asian heritage have spoke up against the practice of “non-culturally specific casting,” in Doran’s words, or colorblind casting. The politics of recognition can be a double-edged sword. One the one hand, intercultural theatre is important testing ground for ethnic equality and raises questions of equal employment opportunity in the UK. On the other hand, can an all-white cast not do justice to the Orphan of Zhao just as an all-Chinese cast performed Richard III at the London Globe and in Beijing? Why would an English adaptation of a Chinese play have to be performed by authentic-looking East Asian actors?

The second is Iqbal Khan’s Much Ado About Nothing that is set in contemporary Delhi and staged at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in August, 2012. Clare Brennan, writing for the Guardian, believes that the transposition of Messina to contemporary Delhi works well, because it “plays to possible audience preconceptions about the communality and hierarchical structuring of life in India that map effectively on to similar structuring in Elizabethan England.” Performed by a cast of second generation British Indian actors to Bollywood-inspired music as part of the WSF, the “postcolonial” production (in Gitanjali Shabani’s words) was quickly compared by the press and reviewers to the two more ethnically authentic productions at the Globe from the Indian Subcontinent (Arpana Company’s All’s Well That Ends Well directed by Sunil Shanbag in Gujarati and Company Theatre’s Twelfth Night directed by Atul Kumar in Hindi). Cultural, linguistic, and ethnic pedigrees are part of the picture. Some critics question the RSC’s form of internationalism. Birmingham-born director Khan’s treatment of Indian culture is seen as too simplistic. Kate Rumbold wishes the production had not ignored but “ironized the company’s inevitable second-generation detachment from India.” Taking issue with the production’s “pastiche of ‘internationalism’, with apparently second generation British actors pretending to return to their cultural roots in a decidedly colonial way,” Kevin Quarmby states that the production offers “the veneer of Indian culture, served on a bed of Bradford or Birmingham Anglicized rice.” He concludes that “as the World Shakespeare Festival and Globe to Globe seasons have shown, ‘international’ is best understood in the context of the nations who embrace Shakespeare as their own.” The more difficult part of these debates concerns commercialized cultural and ethnic identities. Obviously art and commerce are not antithetical activities, but they have become inescapable predicates in the debates about the sociological and expressive values of touring and intercultural Shakespeare performances.

Sites of Origin and Cultural Prestige

In this second decade of the twenty-first century, touring foreign productions of Shakespeare have emerged as a new brand in Britain, competing side by side with British productions. Non-English interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays are not lesser versions of their English counterparts.

At the core of the touring phenomenon is the idea of returning to Britain as a geocultural site of origin (performing “within the architecture Shakespeare wrote for”), as an imaginary site of authenticity (e.g., the Shanghai Kunqu Opera’s adaptation of Macbeth, entitled The Story of the Bloody Hand, performed in Scotland in 1987), and as a privileged site for performative acts (both original practice and international Shakespeares are now the Globe’s main products).

It is interesting to note that the logo of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival is the Earth seen from over the North Atlantic, showing Britain nearest the center of the world. This “return” is part of the organizing principle of some festivals, and the narrative surrounding it is informed by internationalism and (paradoxically) a form of nationalism. As part of the cultural festival to celebrate the 2012 London Olympics, the multilingual World Shakespeare Festival evoked such a “return.” According to festival director Tom Bird and the Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, the festival brought Shakespeare’s plays—“plays which have travelled far and wide”—“back home” to London’s South Bank, “dressed in the clothes of many peoples.”

Part of the touring boom is created by festivals, internationally renowned films, and visiting companies, and part of it is shaped by British directors who incorporate non-Western performance styles into their productions, such as Peter Brook and Tim Supple, or who work with artists from other parts of the world, such as David Tse, and thereby raise awareness of a broader range of performative possibilities among British audiences.

Many theatre artists rely on international spectators to disseminate their decidedly local works, and some festivals thrive on the ideological purchase of being “global.” Msomi’s 1970 adaptation of Macbeth may not have achieved international recognition without the 1972 production at Aldwych (as part of the RSC’s World Theatre Season) and the 1997 revival at the London Globe. U.K. tours are equally important for local companies. Thelma Holt Ltd.’s partnership with Ninagawa since 1990 has benefited both sides and made the Japanese director a mainstay on the English stage, and in 2004 Thelma Holt CBE received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays and Rosette at the Embassy of Japan in the UK in recognition of her contribution to mutual understanding through theatre exchange.

Global Shakespeares have a deterritorializing effect, in the anthropological sense, that unmarks the cultural origins of intercultural productions because they work against assumptions about politically defined geographies in theatre historiography—artificial constraints that no longer speak to the realities of theatre making. Touring productions can also reterritorialize the plays upon arriving in a new location. In a world constantly in motion, representations of certain aspects of culture transcend territorial boundaries. These touring works can be best understood through theatrically defined cultural locations (e.g., a French–Japanese Richard II in Paris and on tour, a “culturally neutral” Richard III made in Beijing but presented in Berlin) rather than through political boundaries (e.g., when “Shakespeare in India” is used as unproductive shorthand for literary universalism). Simplified notions of the universal can be self-deceptive and even self-effacing.

Theatre can produce and redefine visible and invisible cultural localities. Performance history is currently driven by polity, by periodization, and by continental divisions, and as a result it inadvertently creates myths of multiple unknowable objects. Touring global Shakespeares can uncouple speech and writing and problematize various conventions of authenticity and the kind of dramaturgical stability that dulls the edge of theatre. They can unsettle assumptions about the referential stability of Shakespeare as a textual and verbal presence and about non-English performances as a privileged, unified, visual signifier of otherness.

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Alexander Huang is Director of the Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare Program and Associate Professor of English at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and Research Affiliate in Literature at MIT. The recipient of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, he chairs the MLA committee on the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. The co-founder and co-editor of Global Shakespeares, Huang serves as a General Editor of the Shakespearean International Yearbook and performance editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions.

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.

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.

First performed in a workshop with Ariane Mnouchkine in 2000 and later toured, in an extended form, around the world, this one-man show is a professional and emotional tour de force for Wu. Performing in an experimental hybrid of traditional Beijing Opera, or jingju, and postmodern theatrical forms, Wu portrays nine characters from King Lear as well as himself and powerfully engages with aspects of his biography, especially his filial relationship with his late acting teacher and his feelings of identity fragmentation. Consequently, the emphasis of this performance is not on Shakespeare, but on Wu, as Alex Huang notes:

As its full title Lear is Here, Wu Hsing-Kuo Meets Shakespeare suggests, this play is Wu’s autobiographical rendition of Shakespeare’s dramatization of a troubled relationship between father and child. The second part of the title should be accorded primacy. It is Wu who meets Shakespeare, and it is through such an encounter that Wu is able to negotiate multiple identities, especially that of Wu as a performer and that of his dead master.” (Huang 219-220)

Critical responses to Lear is Here have followed Huang in largely focusing on these autobiographical themes; Wu himself has also foregrounded these issues in his discussions of the performance. However, this abundance of critical attention has left some of the production’s other themes unexplored. In this paper I examine how Wu uses Lear as a vehicle for a meditation not only on specific details of his autobiography, but on larger issues of transience and the inevitability of loss. Although these themes resonate throughout the play, I would argue that Act One, which features Lear in the storm, is a particularly fitting segment with which to view these issues. This is partially because of the lack of stasis inherent in the storm and the heath. As Steve Mentz argues, “New ecologists see constant change and instability as fundamental to natural systems, and Shakespeare’s play represents the human consequences of living in this incessantly mutable world” (Mentz 139). Wu’s representation of Lear on the heath, I argue, similarly engages with the traumatic consequences of living in a changeable world, especially as those consequences relate to Wu himself. In Act One Wu thus combines his personal autobiography, Lear as a character, and deeply symbolic sets and costumes to relate Shakespeare’s “universal” themes of transience and loss through a highly personal lens.

Eschewing much of the original plot of King Lear, Wu structures his production to emphasize this personal experience. Act 1, “Play,” features Lear in the storm upon the heath. Largely nonverbal, this twenty seven-minute long act highlights Wu’s mastery of pantomime and acrobatics. By contrast, Act 2, “Playing,” showcases Wu’s ability to shift roles and the identity fracturing that results. In this act Wu switches back and forth between an astonishing nine characters: The Fool, the Earl of Kent, Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, blind Gloucester, Edmund, and “mad” Edgar. Act 3, “Player,” returns the focus to Wu, who plays himself as a character in an act tinged with Buddhist overtones. As Huang notes, “the play is a journey from the inner world of the lonely Lear, through a burst of multiple identities and characters, to the autobiographical, manifested by the lonely Wu Hsing-Kuo” (220). Restructuring the play in this way thus allows Wu to dramatize his personal relationship with Shakespeare, the eponymous “meeting” of the second half of his production’s title.

Wu’s participation in—and reimaging of—the jingju theatrical tradition is an important element in his autobiographical approach to the play. Jingju is a highly stylized form of theater that combines vocal performance, dance, music, mime, and acrobatics and that has a markedly political component in Wu’s home country of Taiwan due to its close association with “Chineseness.” As Huang notes, “After martial law was lifted [in Taiwan] in the 1980s, jingju’s association with China became its ‘original sin,’ as it were. Jingju thus evolved from a state-endorsed and well-funded theater genre to one that was rejected by the majority of the Taiwanese audience” (Huang 217). Wu’s interest in and commitment to jingju has thus led to several clashes with the arts funding structure in Taiwan. Wu’s frustration at the lack of funding available for jingju performances is palpable in his Act One performance of Lear, as he himself suggests: “You can see that inside King Lear, his thought is full of rage and unhappiness—he is not satisfied. And my character is like King Lear’s; as an artist, I like to work in a way that is very open and free, but when we apply for financial support, we are often examined very strictly, and made to work in more conventional ways. So I am frustrated too!” (Wu) In Act One, Wu mixes jingju performance vocabulary—including acrobatics, stylized gestures, a heavy emphasis on percussion, and movements of his sleeves and beard—with highly symbolic sets and costumes to represent not only this frustration with the apparent transience of jingju in Taiwan, but his understanding of the larger roles ephemerality and loss play in human life.

The audience first glimpses Lear standing in a ring of dim light. Because his face and figure remain dark, however, the effect of this light is oppressive rather than revelatory, constricting rather than illuminating. Furthermore, the circle of light on the stage is veined with a lacy pattern that evokes both tree roots and the veins of the eyes, in keeping with not only the topoi of seeing and blindness so central to King Lear, but also Lear’s simultaneously antagonistic and symbiotic relationship to the natural world, exemplified by the storm. For even as Lear rages against the storm, it is presented by both Shakespeare and Wu as a crucial part of his psyche, an observation that is also echoed by Oliver’s apt reduction of the play in “Slings and Arrows” to a relatively simple matter of a great actor and a tin sheet. Wu’s presentation of Lear on the heath in his first act allows him to draw an especially explicit comparison between Lear and the storm, as it is not until the audience hears the first clap of thunder that Lear fully emerges into the light. The storm must begin before the play can.

Along with the storm, the set for Act One emphasizes Lear’s vulnerability. Lear’s stage is arranged in a circle, with four large stone figures flanking the playing area. Variously headless or armless and in an antique style, these figures evoke both the civilization from which Lear has been outcast and the inevitable destruction of that civilization. In this evocation, Lear is Here echoes Emily Sun’s argument about the “limits of sovereignty” (Sun 21). Sun argues that what Lear wants—and this is Lear’s big mistake—is freedom from the political realm. However, for this to work out, there must be a political realm to begin with, and this requires that his daughters play the necessary parts. Cordelia’s “nothing” is destructive because it demolishes the knowable political realm in favor of an as-yet unknowable relationality, a connection between people in excess of the roles given to them by the state. King Lear thus calls upon the reader to imagine a world that is “always in the process of being created, always in excess of any kingdom or community conceived according to identifiable predicates of belonging” (Sun 77). In their ability to signify both civilization and its destruction, the statues that loom over Wu’s performance in Act One similarly call upon the audience to imagine society not as stasis, but flux.

This is further emphasized at the end of the act, as one by one each of the four statues fall into the performance space. Interestingly, the statues makes room for the second act’s more naturalistic set, which consists of large piles of rocks that evoke the cliffs of Dover and that will play a crucial part in Gloucester’s intended suicide. This relegation of naturalism to the second act, much of which takes place in the palaces of Goneril and Regan and not on the heath, seems odd, especially given the first act’s emphasis on the storm and Lear’s antagonistic relationship to nature. Jan Kott is helpful here; as he notes, “objects have now been raised [in what he calls the “modern theatre”] to the status of symbols of human fate, or situation, and perform a similar function to that played in Shakespeare by forest, storm, or eclipse of the sun” (Kott 134). Although built with the intention of durability, of all but immortalizing the figure depicted, stone statues, like human beings, are always already in a state of decay. In this way statues are particularly useful as signifiers not only for the fall of civilization but, as Kott argues, for human fate. Like the statues, Lear’s vision of political stasis will chip away—indeed, it already has, for Lear’s tribulations in the storm begin after his daughters have cast him out, just as Wu’s performance begins after he has lost his relationship with his acting master, a point which I will further discuss below. By including the statues in his first act, “The Play,” Wu thus gestures to both what has come before in the play text (Lear’s degradation in the apparently civilized realm now controlled by his daughters) and what will come after (the kingdom’s descent into chaos and Lear’s death). Importantly, though, this scene does not come after anything in Wu’s version. Rather, Lear’s exposure on the heath is both the before and after event in Lear is Here, a paradox that, by presenting Lear’s madness as the founding event of the play, emphasizes the extent to which trauma is an inherent element of change. With their missing arms and heads and their ability to act as symbols of both Lear’s outcast status and the inevitability of social collapse, the statues also emphasize the close relationship between transience and trauma.

Although Act One is largely nonverbal, Lear’s few songs and speeches reveal a keen awareness of the trauma of loss. One moment particularly stands out for its pathos. Throughout the play Wu uses his considerable skills as a physical performer to evoke not only Lear’s varied moods, but the stark differences between his moments of lucidity and madness. The movements of lucid Lear are purposeful and smooth. Although his hands shake, befitting a laosheng (old man) figure in the jingju tradition, lucid Lear tends to remain fairly stationary in the playing space, and the musicians match his stasis with sustained notes and chords.

Mad Lear, on the other hand, is often all frenetic energy, his quickly mincing steps and extravagant tossing of his beard and sleeves mirrored by the discordant, frantic percussive music.

Mad Lear can also be childish, however, and it is during one of these moments of simplicity that Lear betrays his keenest awareness of loss. Previous to this moment, Lear has killed a bird that was annoying him. This could have been a humorous moment; after all, Lear’s anger was precipitated by the bird’s biting him on the nose. Instead it is a terribly sad one, as the bird’s gentle song—a marked contrast to the tumultuous noise of the storm—is cut short by its death, leaving only a deafening silence. Shortly thereafter Lear slides into a state of childish simplicity. Taking mincing steps and assuming a shy smile and high, sing-song voice, Lear reminisces about his daughter’s childhood: “I, who favor the fair March, / Spy a blossom in the wild field. / Daddy picks a flower for the youngest daughter to wear in her hair. / I wish to see neither the flowers fade, nor the spring end. /  Yet, the flowers fade and the spring stays not…” In this, his first speech after killing the bird, Wu/Lear betrays a keen awareness of the transience inherent to both human and nonhuman life. Lear’s childlike state of mind, as well as his remembrance of his daughter as a child, reflects the inevitability of aging, while Lear’s evocation of the fading flowers and passing spring serves as a meditation on the mutability of the natural world.

Fittingly for a performance in the jingju tradition, Lear’s costume is an especially important conveyance for the production’s thematic content. This is particularly apparent near the end of the act, as

in full view of the audience, Wu transforms himself from the old Lear into a Taiwanese jingju actor, removing his headdress and opera beard to reveal the painted face pattern denoting a jingju combatant male role. He also takes off his costume to reveal his undercoat. While this undercoat is part of the costume, it is never revealed onstage. It supports the heavy costume of a combatant male role. By removing the headdress and revealing what is underneath the costume, Wu stages the theater-making process in reverse. (Huang 222)

This meta-theatricality is an important part of the autobiographical story Wu is trying to tell. As Wu has noted in his stage bill and in several interviews, he was especially attracted to King Lear because of the issues it raises about fatherhood, concerns that, for Wu, also intersect with his relationship to the theater. Having lost his biological father at a young age, Wu found a surrogate father figure in his acting teacher, Master Zhou Zhengrong, who trained him in the combatant male role type (wusheng) of jingju. As Wu became a better-known performer, however, he found himself engaging in conflict with Master Zhou. Following one particularly heated exchange, Master Zhou refused to acknowledge Wu as a pupil, an estrangement that existed even upon Master Zhou’s death and that is reflected in Wu’s attitude towards the trappings of his performance of Lear.

Initially Wu throws the robe and undercoat down onto the floor in a spurt of anger, apparently rejecting the power that the character of Lear has had over him. In doing so, I argue, Wu is also rejecting his master, who he has frequently compared to Lear. Soon, however, Wu’s mood turns more contemplative. Having discarded his clothes in anger, he folds them reverentially, and for quite a while he carries the beard and wig, carefully positioning them so they continue to form the silhouette of a face. In a scene reminiscent of Hamlet in the graveyard, Wu addresses this silhouette as though it were a mirror, asking both himself and the audience, “Where is Lear?” Huang notes that “by addressing the costumes of Lear, Wu stages the king as two bodies, that of a fictional character and that of a human performer representing that character, juxtaposed to reveal the performer in search of an identity” (Huang 223). While this splitting of identity across actor and character reflects Wu’s conflicted feelings towards his late master, I would argue that it also serves to highlight the fundamentally ephemeral nature of the stage. Wu’s Lear is a powerfully realized character while embodied, but at the end of the act the audience is left only with a pile of clothes, the closest thing in the performance to a representation of Lear’s death. Lear’s mortality is in sharp contrast with Wu’s insistence on stasis: “I am back,” he says. “I’m still I that was, I that am, and I that shall be!” Given the play’s relentless emphasis on transience, such an announcement plays as profoundly defiant: in spite of the inevitability of plays to end, characters to die, and relationships to fade, the actor know as Wu Hsing-Kuo continues. Wu, like Lear, is here.

And yet this defiance falters, as, according to Steve Mentz, its source text dictates that it must:

Juxtaposing the desire of the self to maintain its identity against the natural world’s stubborn exteriority, refusal to be incorporated, and dynamic re-inscription and violation of bodily boundaries, King Lear suggests that all systems of natural order—from pastoral utopianism to homeostatic constancy—can and will become unstable. Inside this storm-filled world, the play offers clarity of vision in place of sustainable hope. (141)

Wu’s similar approach to the myth of permanence is revealed by play’s end, as a subdued Wu gives in to the unavoidable mutability of the world: “Lonely and quiet, I look coldly at the moon / That rises, sets, waxes and wanes.” Repeated twice, this final statement asserts the paradoxical fact, expressed so well in the old adage, that there is nothing permanent except change, that all life is inherently ephemeral. Wu speaks these words while he is being raised above the stage and into the space of storms and weather. Significantly, the stone statues of the first act, perhaps the play’s most evocative metaphor for instability, rise with him.

Works Cited

Huang, Alex. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Kott, Jan.Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966.

Mentz, Steve. “Strange Weather in King Lear.” Shakespeare 6.2 (2010), 139-152.

Spencer, David. “Slings and Arrows.” Aisle Say TV. No date. Web. 17 April 2012.

Wu Hsing-Kuo in interview with Joyce McMillan. “EIF 2011 – Interview with Wu Hsing-Kuo, the solo King Lear.” Joyce McMillan Online. March 2011. Web. 17 April 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)