The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800 presents:
Frontier Shakespeare: Africa, The UK, and Western Australia
Date: Tuesday 26th February 2013
Time: 5pm to 7pm
Venue: Octagon Theatre, University of Western Australia
This roundtable will be followed at 8pm by the opening night performance of the Two Gents on the New Fortune stage. For tickets to the performance visit: www.ticketsWA.com
The arrival of Two Gents Productions at the New Fortune Theatre in Perth in 2013 is another stage in a global trajectory. The Two Gents performed The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Vakomana Vaviri Ve Zimbabwe) in the world’s first Shona translation at Shakespeare’s Globe for the Globe to Globe festival. This award-winning festival, celebrating the London 2012 Olympics, hosted thirty-seven companies from around the world. WA’s own Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company represented Australia, performing Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the first ever translation of Shakespeare into Nyungar. A performance of these sonnets opens the Perth International Arts Festival 2013.
The “Frontier Shakespeare” roundtable brings the Two Gents together with Kate Cherry (Artistic Director, Black Swan State Theatre Company), Paige Newmark (Artistic Director, Shakespeare WA), Robert Marshall (Executive Producer of Live Recordings at Shakespeare’s Globe), Emeritus Professor Chris Wortham, who taught literature in Zimbabwe for many years, and Winthrop Professor Robert White, a pre-eminent scholar in the field of Shakespeare and emotions. These stalwarts of Shakespearean research and production will discuss the global appeal of Shakespeare and what characterises Western Australian performances of Shakespeare. In this roundtable conversation we consider what happens when you dis-place Shakespeare and when you re-place the plays elsewhere.
What happens when you deprive Shakespeare of his tongue and re-word the plays for a different audience? What happens when you exchange the histories, fairytales and myths that underpin the plays with those from other cultures? We consider whether these adaptations, translations, and appropriations are more concerned with global futures or national pasts and whether Frontier Shakespeare is a cultural act of globalization. We invite you to join in the discussion.
Dr Penelope Woods, Research Associate at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) at UWA, who recently arrived from Shakespeare’s Globe, will lead this conversation. It will consider the role of emotions in adapting and re-presenting Shakespeare’s plays and ask whether emotions translate across time and between cultures when language can’t.
For more information, contact: Penelope Woods (penelope.woods@uwa.edu.au), Tel: +61 8 6488 3858 or www.historyofemotions.org.au.