Intercultural Shakespeare

Intercultural Shakespeare

Would you like to engage with Shakespeare in performance from a range of cultural perspectives? Are you interested in enriching your knowledge of familiar characters, scenes and concepts by seeing them through a new lens?

On this four-day course you will experience Shakespeare through exciting intercultural perspectives from Japanese theatre to Bollywood to African and South-Asian Diaspora. Delivered by expert practitioners and academics, it combines practical exercises with lively discussions to develop your performing skills and deepen your understanding of Shakespeare.

Throughout the course, you will participate in some of the most urgent debates about “authentic” Shakespeare and ownership of Shakespeare, experience Shakespeare in  translations, gain a thorough understanding of Shakespeare in diverse cultures, and appreciate why we need to learn from and contribute to Shakespeare from intercultural perspectives. This course encourages you to see that there are many ways of interpreting Shakespeare and his characters or there are many Shakespeares and you can make him your own by reinvigorating his work within your own culture.

Course Content

On day one you will gain some of the basic practical skills for performing Shakespeare onstage. You will receive training in voice and speech, in verse speaking and acting technique, allowing you to end the day performing a staged reading of a Shakespeare scene or a monologue.

On day two you will examine Shakespeare in Japan. What does it mean for Shakespeare to be translated into Japanese? How can A Midsummer Night’s Dream resonate with a Japanese audience? What can specific elements of Japanese culture and language add to Hamlet? You will end the day performing the same scene or monologue as you did on day one, allowing the learning from the above questions to influence how you bring your own culture to Shakespeare’s work. 

Day three is titled ‘Shakespeare’s Brown Heroines’. It draws on Dr Varsha Panjwani’s research into Bollywood and South Asian diaspora Shakespeares on the one hand and intersectional feminism on the other to focus on brown actresses’ contributions to Shakespeare studies and performance. You will engage with the performance choices, costumes, and cultural contexts of a British Asian production of Much Ado About Nothing and multiple Bollywood versions of Hamlet to trace how casting brown actresses as Shakespeare’s heroines not only allows brown women to use Shakespeare to discuss issues such as arranged marriages, hybrid identities, and intersectional feminism but it also brings new insight into the way in which Hero, Beatrice, Margaret, and Gertrude can be interpreted and performed. On this day, you will be guided in designing your own costumes and come up with your own backstories for Gertrude with the aim of creating empowering, nuanced, and diverse portrayals of Shakespeare’s heroines.  

On day four Mawa Theatre Company will address and lead discussions on how Black and Black Mixed Race Women are represented in classical text. Mawa will guide you on the choices that they have made in their online performance videos and how that can translate to you as the actor. This day will be a performance-based workshop with a monologue sharing at the end of the day.

Course Fees - £550*

*Bursary places are available for this course, please see details in the tab below