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.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

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.

References

Beauty and Consolation. Episode 1. VPRO NL. 5th May, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPK3Mv6_Aps. Last accessed 22/7/2016.
Google Scholar

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London & New York: Verso, 2012.
Google Scholar

Eglinton, Andrew. “Reflections on a Decade of Punchdrunk Theatre.” Theatre Forum 37 2010): 46-55.
Google Scholar

Gordon, Colette. “Pedestrian Shakespeare and Punchdrunk’s Immersive Theatre.” Cahiers Elisabethains 82 (2012): 43-50.
Google Scholar

Graça Moura, Vasco. Sonetos de Shakespeare. Lisboa: Bertrand, 2011.
Google Scholar

Grob, Thomas. “’One Cannot Act Hamlet, One Must be Hamlet’: The Acculturation of Hamlet in Russia.” Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm. Eds. Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen. Basingstoke, Hants. and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 191-228.
Google Scholar

Henderson, Diana. Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Google Scholar

Kennedy, Dennis. The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Google Scholar

McLuskie, Kate and Kate Rumbold. Cultural Value in Twenty-first Century England: the Case of Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.
Google Scholar

Rancière, Jacques. Le Spectateur Emancipé. Paris: La Fabrique, 2008.
Google Scholar

Rodrigues, Tiago. By Heart e Outras Peças Curtas. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2016.
Google Scholar

Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Stanley Wells. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear. Ed. Jay Halio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Google Scholar

Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. California: University of California Press, 1992.
Google Scholar

Tusk, Donald. Letter by President Donald Tusk to the Members of the European Council on his proposal for a new settlement for the United Kingdom within the European Union. Council of the European Union. 20th February 2016. http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2016/02/02-letter-tuskproposal-new-settlement-uk/ Last accessed 20/11/2016.
Google Scholar

Villas Boas, Fernando. William Shakespeare: Rei Lear. Porto: TNSJ/Edições Húmus, 2016.
Google Scholar

Downloads

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

Issue

Section

Articles

Most read articles by the same author(s)

Similar Articles

<< < 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 > >> 

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.