"All the world's a stage." - As You Like It
Performance Shakespeare 2016 is a digital resource that offers a snapshot of what Shakespeare in performance looked like in the quatercentenary year.
The range of theatrical productions and performance events covered by Shakespeare 2016 shows an exciting variety of styles and the staggering diversity of artists and audiences who worked with and enjoy Shakespeare across world languages, cultures, and traditions.
Take a look at the performances here. There are 435 posts featuring Shakespeare performances and events across 83 different countries around the world.
Struggles of nationality, ambition and gender-inequality set the tone for a different take on Othello. In a landscape of Plastic and Isolation, Othello marries the daughter of an Icelandic entrepreneur. Iago, an ambitious woman, feels betrayed when Othello selects a young man as his next in command. Co-produced by Vesturport.
This performance dramatized the comic elements of the original play very effectively. This production employed comical modern dresses and pictorial stage design reminiscent of Fernando Botero's paintings. Actors' and actresses' performances were swift, delightful, and sophisticated.
Director Jung-ung Yang emphasized the contemporaneity of the play with modern and cosmopolitan costumes, music and dances. The imagistic stage was very impressive, too. The 30m depth stage covered with 50t sand created the image of sea and island. The gigantic statue of Diana's head, which was laid down sideway on the stage left, expressed the precarious deity. The huge images of a compass and a moon, which were alternatively projected on the back screen of the stage, gave a proper background to Pericles, who wanders from place to place. Gower, who led the whole play as a narrator, was transformed into old Pericles.
An evocative re-interpretation of Lear choreographed by John Scott and featuring Valda Setterfield, one of the world’s most acclaimed postmodern dancers. A trio of male dancers play the daughters to Setterfield’s king, as the performance shifts effortlessly between movement and spoken dialogue, between Shakespeare’s text and the heartbreaking realities of aging in our contemporary world.
In this post, three reviewers report on a Twelfth Night and a Julius Caesar in Armenian translation, a comic Iranian version of Macbeth, and a Shakespeare-themed dance performance, as the Armenian Shakespeare Association's conference Shakespeare 400: The Enigma of Endurance coincided with the annual Shakespeare Theatre Festival in Yerevan.
The Lovers is inspired by the stories of well known Shakespearean couples. It is a site-specific performance investigating the tortuous tensions which give spaces, relationships and events an erotic dimension and which become unexpected ground for love. A poetic, raw and sometimes grotesque exploration inside the human being, where sensuality can be grafted in the darkest passions, in the most difficult conditions or in the playful taste of pleasure.
Hamlet, de los Andes is a free adaptation of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. This take on Hamlet is a Bolivian one, drawn from a distinct reading by the company and the director. They have contextualized the play in the struggle and uncertainty of trying to reconcile a modern world with an ancient tradition, and restructured the play in an abridged version, relying on just three actors and one musician. The storyline and the events have been simplified and the characters reduced. Their Hamlet is a modern day man who has lost his self-awareness. He faces the impossibility of recognizing and coming to terms with himself after the fall. Who is Hamlet? Is it me or is it you? Is Hamlet the Teatro de los Andes itself? Is it the most recent bit of Bolivian history? By means of a proposal packed with metaphors and intertextuality, Teatro de Los Andes’ Hamlet experiences the uprising of the being, of art, of the homeland, of the world.
The play script is an adaptation of a film, titled Angoor, based on the Comedy of Errors, both done by Gulzar. The theatre adaptation enhances the threat and menace of the identity mix-ups.
“Our flagship show for this coming season will be Twelfth Night. A show that is about adventure, and sailing ships and the crazy things people do for love. That sounds a lot like Perchance, its theatre and the artists who want to work there.
A beautiful, yet much more serious exploration of the season’s theme will be Romeo & Juliet. This show delves into the darker side of love and the lengths we will go for it. There are lessons to be learned about single-minded pursuit and rigid stances that we can all take away from here.” –from the Perchance Artistic Director Danielle Irvine, in the 2016 programme
As part of the official programme commemorating the 400th year anniversary of the deaths of Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, Performance Infinity helped the ‘The Malachites’ break new ground by taking responsibility for their first international tour of China.
Founded in 2013 ‘The Malachites’ are a site-specific theatre company who aim to reconnect Shakespeare and his plays to the areas in which he lived and worked, as well as bringing their own unique style to an international audience.
This year saw the Malachites take Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most revered play, to the Guangzhou Dramatic Arts Centre, China. Having previously played in venues ranging from historic gardens to Churches, this was an event not to be missed. In conjunction with Performance Infinity, ‘The Malachites’ production received critical acclaim, performing to a sold out Chinese audience.
The performance took place at the Cultural Centre del Bosque as a part of global programme of events and activities destined to celebrate William Shakespeare’s work on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his death. The Mexican adaptation of Measure for Measure preserves the original Shakespearean plot, which brings to life a conflict both passionate and simple in nature, a story line with major consequences, one that exceeds the limits of intimacy and is transformed into a matter of power.
This production relocated King Lear from ancient Britain to the Northern Territory, Australia, thus establishing a thought-provoking link between Lear's disastrous division of his kingdom and land ownership and social reform in Australia, following the first Land Rights Act of 1976. The concern with land was powerfully conveyed by the red sand that covered the vast expanses of the stage of the Barbican theatre. The gigantic road train that towered over the stage was a painful reminder of the environmental and social ravages caused by intensive mining in the region. The exploitation of the land goes against the Aboriginal belief that we do not own the land, but that the land owns us. Another exciting aspect of this production was the blending of Shakespeare's lines with Kriol and other Aboriginal languages which, along with live singing and live music on stage, evoked the soundscape of the Northern Territory.
“The Winter’s Tale explores the unsteady, unsettling, poisonous realm of jealousy and distrust as a childhood friendship is irrevocably torn apart by a grievous misunderstanding.
King Leontes of Sicilia accuses his pregnant wife, Hermione, of infidelity with best friend and fellow King of neighboring Bohemia, Polixenes. His rage and misguided tyranny results in the plot to have the King of Bohemia killed, banish the newborn baby girl, imprison his innocent wife, and turn his stunned staff and nation against him. Directed by Artistic Director of AASC, L. Peter Callender, this study of love, jealousy, tyranny and ultimate forgiveness will bring all the complicated plot twists, memorable characters and one of Shakespeare’s most magical and romantic and unforgettable endings to life.” –blurb from the African American Shakespeare Company’s website
A punk-rock, dynamic and visceral take on Shakespeare’s classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream interpreted by the 3rd year students of the Théâtre du Pommier in Neuchâtel (CH) as they end their training in drama.
What happens when morals collapse? Macbeth cannot stop murdering once he’s started. There is no place for empathy in his hunt for what he most desires: complete power. Verdi’s music and David Radok’s detailed directions drive the action towards the end. This production opened at Gothenburg Opera in 2008.
The 400th Anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare was celebrated by Tamashagan Institute of Performing Arts with an event at the Tehran Independent Theatre. The event included performances by Kalepookha company, Michael Shahrestani, Yaser Khaseb and Dr. Ghotbodin Sadeghi. During the event, Mahyar Haririchi painted Shakespeare’s portrait.
A radical reworking of Shakespeare's Henry V, 1, 2 and 3, Henry VI, and Richard III, combining bold cuts - 1 Henry VI is reduced to two brief sequences totalling just under 200 words - with van Hove's characteristic attention to the nuances of the Shakespearean text. Other prominent features are: the use of live video footage, a flock of sheep when Henry VI fantasies about being a 'homely swain', and the layering of the performance space - a brightly lit white corridor wraps around the main stage and a huge screen and a ceiling-high wall mirror bring additional depth to the main staging area.
“If we say one of the names, the other follows it. Our memory cannot evoke one without the other. Plutarch wrote that, from them on, love became the ability to see the world through the sensibility of someone else’s soul.
They mixed love and politics and came up with a politics of love. They are a historical love story. They are a romance based on real events often romanticized about. Shakespeare built them a verbal monument that turned into the truest of truths what never happened to them. In Mankiewicz’s film that led 20th Century Fox to bankruptcy, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the celluloid and real couple they never – and always – were.
In this show written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz are the here-and-now duo of what they were there-and-then. They are and are not Antony and Cleopatra. They are Antony seeing the world through Cleopatra’s eyes. And vice-versa. Always vice-versa. Vice-versa as a rule of love. Vice-versa as a rule of theatre. This show is seeing the world vicariously, through the sensibility of the souls of Antony and Cleopatra.” (from the company programme)
This is a dance-theatre piece that subsumes the narrative of Romeo and Juliet into the urban street culture of Johannesburg. The production premiered in 2015 and enjoyed an international tour in Germany. Its ongoing success this year means it will likely tour again in the coming months.
Note: This project is now complete and we are not able to accept new contributions.
