Dehierarchizing Space: Performer-Audience Collaborations in Two Portuguese Performances of Shakespeare

Authors

  • Francesca Rayner CEHUM, Universidade do Minho

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2017-0003

Keywords:

Shakespeare, King Lear, Sonnet 30, performance space, audience participation

Abstract

This article addresses the key role of performance space in mediating between cultural locations. It discusses two Portuguese performances of Shakespeare where audiences were invited to become part of the performance and the ways in which this dehierarchization of the performance space framed a cross-cultural encounter between a globalized text and a localized performance context. In Teatro Oficina’s 2012 King Lear, both audience and performers sat around a large table in a production which reflected upon questions of individual and collective responsibility in Shakespearean tragedy and in the wider political sphere. In the middle of this performance space hung a large cube onto which the translated text was projected, setting up a spatial tension between text and performance that also foregrounded the translocation of the Shakespearean text to a Portuguese performance context. In Tiago Rodrigues’ 2013 By Heart, ten members of the audience were invited onstage to learn Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 “by heart and not by brain.”1 In doing so, Rodrigues emphasized the cultural embeddedness of Shakespearean texts in a wider European cultural context and operated a subtle shift from texts to performance as a privileged repository for the cultural memory of Shakespeare. The article explores how these spatial shifts signaled the possibility of enabling cross-cultural identifications with Shakespeare through performance.

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Author Biography

Francesca Rayner, CEHUM, Universidade do Minho

Francesca Rayner is Assistant Professor at the Universidade do Minho, Portugal, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Theatre and Performance. Her research centres on the cultural politics of performance in Portugal, with a particular interest in the performance of Shakespeare in Portugal. Her doctoral thesis Caught in the Act: The Representation of Sexual Transgression was published in 2006 (CEHUM, Universidade do Minho). Since then, she has published widely on Shakespeare in national and international journals, including Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare and has acted as referee for journals such as the SEDERI Yearbook and Borrowers and Lenders. She was a member of the research project “The presence of Shakespeare in Spain and the mark of his European reception”, coordinated by the University of Murcia, between 2008 and 2013 and was an evaluator and researcher for the European Union performance project “P-STAGE”, which produced a lusophone version of Macbeth between 2013 and 2014. She has also co-edited two anthologies: Theatre and Economics: Challenges in Times of Crisis (2011) Lisboa: TNDM & Bicho do Mato. 2011 with Maria João Brilhante and Mónica Almeida and, with Ana Gabriela Macedo, Gender, Visual Culture and Performance (2011) Ribeirão: Húmus.

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Published

2017-06-30

How to Cite

Rayner, F. (2017). Dehierarchizing Space: Performer-Audience Collaborations in Two Portuguese Performances of Shakespeare. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 15(30), 27–41. https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2017-0003

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