Symposia
Symposium III
Holding Up the Mirror: Authenticity and Adaptation in Shakespeare Today
Friday, April 22, 2011 (tentative)
Venue TBD
Much of what we might call the “Shakespearean record” – the texts of the plays, evidence of original staging conditions, artifacts of performance traditions – is contained in libraries and archives. Theatre artists engage with this record in different ways. Some strive to reproduce Shakespeare’s plays as audiences of his own time would have seen them. Others seek to discover fresh relevance to contemporary issues through dramaturgy and design, but maintain some sort of fidelity to Shakespeare's text and vision. And others dismantle the texts altogether and reconstruct them as largely new works with wholly new meanings. This Symposium will focus on three recent Shakespeare productions as case studies of the three different responses. The first attempts to offer a mirror image of authentic 17th-century Shakespeare; the second sees in Shakespeare a mirror for our own time; the third takes Shakespeare through the looking-glass into an alternate universe which reminds us strangely of our own.
For more information, or to participate in the planning, contact Symposium Planning Committee Chair, Stephen Kuehler
Past Symposia
Symposium II - Performance Reclamation: Research, Discovery, and Interpretation, February 16, 2007
Symposium I - Performance Documentation and Preservation in an Online Environment, October 10, 2003
Last updated: January 14, 2010