Reversing Midsummer: Alexander Ekman’s Dance-Theatre Adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (original) (raw)
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Shakespeare Bulletin, 2022
Puck famously concludes A Midsummer Night’s Dream by suggesting that the players’ utmost goal has been to avoid offending their audience and offering to “mend” any damage the play might have caused (Epilogue 8). While superficially conciliatory, Puck’s final speech reminds the audience, yet again, of Dream’s many offenses and harms, and challenges theater practitioners to navigate the darker, more unsettling aspects of the play-text. Taking its cue from Puck, our introduction to this special issue on Dream in modern performance outlines the key inequities and disharmonies of the play-text that might be taken up in performance, including problems of consent, misogyny, colonialism, inequity, and ecological disaster. In the second half of the introduction, we offer a brief survey of how some of these issues have been addressed—magnified, mitigated, or erased—in the play’s staging history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Finally, we conclude by briefly summarizing how the essays in this special issue explore the mixed results of theatrical projects around the world that employ the play as a tool for social critique and/or imagining alternative futures.
Tangled Relations: Shakespeare and Ballet
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music, 2022
This chapter explores the complex, reciprocal influences that weave back and forth through the performance histories of Shakespeare and of ballet, tracing their concerted force in shaping and reshaping commonplaces in Shakespeare, ballet, and the world at large. It offers a preliminary sketch of the historical landscape in which Shakespeare-ballet connections reside, laying out routes across time, and signalling landmarks both past and present that figure importantly in the development and our understanding of these connections. It analyses the pivotal role of Romeo and Juliet ballets danced to Prokofiev’s score, as Shakespeare ballets became prominent in this landscape in the mid-twentieth century. The mediation involving three voices and languages—verbal, corporeal, and musical—plays a central role in this discussion which includes first-hand accounts from present-day choreographers, composers, and dancers. Throughout, the chapter offers observations, reflections, and questions aimed at moving the young but burgeoning field of Shakespeare-and-Ballet forwards, pushing its boundaries and signalling new intersections. The larger aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the full measure of Shakespeare- ballet connections and their value in even wider cultural contexts than Shakespeare stud ies and dance studies.
"It's Like I've Walked Right Out of My Dreams": Dream Ballets in the Broadway Musical
This thesis analyzes selected dream ballets, examining their appearances and investigating how they were used throughout their existence, offering a new perspective on an often-neglected dramatic device of American music theater. Each chapter analyzes the dream ballet from a different interrelated perspective: (1) as a transformative, liminal stage in the course of plot through which the main character(s) undergo some rite of passage (e.g., a “coming of age” ritual); (2) as a device of theatrical artifice rather than an engine of dramatic action; and (3) as a vehicle of political agency. My study analyzes four iconic examples: the dream ballet sequences of Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), West Side Story (1957), and Billy Elliot the Musical (London, 2005). A relatively unexamined field in academic discourse, the dream ballet has rarely been the focus of scholarly investigation. Many of the secondary sources I use in this paper are either studies of the genre generally or of specific productions or biographies on significant figures of my research. My primary sources are housed in archival manuscript collections at the New York Library for the Performing Arts or the Library of Congress, where I conducted my research during the summer of 2016. I integrate such sources with theoretical approaches derived from psychology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and other fields—Sigmund Freud’s classic formulations in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Victor Turner’s anthropological concept of liminality, and Ellen Koskoff’s work on performing gender—to move beyond the specific case studies toward a broader musicological consideration of the dream ballet as a dramatic device. Through this approach, I bring the dream ballet to the fore of musicological thought, both creating a theoretical framework through which to interpret the device and revealing new insights into the musical, cultural, and performative dimensions of music theater.
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2022
Drawing from the decolonial perspective (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2012; Mignolo, Walsh 2018) and the biocultural partnership-dominator model propounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler (1987; Eisler, Fry 2019), this essay explores The Moor’s Pavane (1949), one of the most successful dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello by the Mexican-American emigree, dancer and choreographer José Limon (1908-1972). In this paper I will draw a parallel between the Bard’s text and Limon’s dance composition to show how textual and embodied forms can merge and become a perfect medium for the displaying of all nuances in human ‘nature’, desires, and relations. In the world of ballet, the performance was revolutionary because it presented for the first time Limon’s original technique, a complex re-working of Humphrey and Weidman’s practices and a mixture of different dance-styles and tempos. The Pavane, a rigidly fixed court dance performed in Northern Italy around the Renaissance period, becomes the means through which Limon portrays the changing of order and stability of Shakespeare’s plot, so as to debunk the hypocrisy of Elizabethan society and embody Othello’s falling into Iago’s trap. In my analysis, I will explore how Limon transposed and decolonised the Shakespearean tragedy through highly innovative fall-recovery movements, iconic gestures, and precise geometrical patterns. I will focus in particular on Limon’s choice to reduce the intricate plot to a four-hand partnership dance between two different and yet parallel couples, Othello-Desdemona and Emilia-Iago. The aim of my analysis is to show how Limon slowly breaks up the Pavane’s immutable tempo in order to provide a rhythmical crescendo of movements that express the tensions, disillusionment and final choices of the main protagonists.
Dreams and Ambiguity on Svevo's European Stage: La rigenerazione and A Midsummer Night's Dream
“Dreams and Ambiguity on Svevo’s European Stage: La rigenerazione and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in “Oh Mio Vecchio William!” Italo Svevo and His Shakespeare. Ed. Carmine Di Biase. Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d'italianistica, 2015. 61-90. In 1884 Italo Svevo sent the renowned actress Eleonora Duse an Italian translation of Romeo and Juliet with the note, “Il sottoscritto si permette offrirLe pella rappresentazione questo suo dramma che scrisse proprio pensando a Lei. Non chiede altri diritti di autore che quelli che la legge in vigore quando visse gli concedeva. — G. Shakespeare.” Much has been made of Ettore Schmitz’s pen names and this signature is similarly significant: addressing Duse as Shakespeare reveals not only Svevo’s playfulness, but also his personal association with the Bard. Even Romeo and Juliet, which at first glance may seem to have little in common with Svevo’s forma mentis, was a work he treasured enough to share with the formidable actress. Although Svevo primarily mentions the tragedies, like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, the magnitude of Shakespeare’s significance to Svevo and the humor of Svevo’s own plays suggest that Svevo’s relationship to Shakespeare’s comedies is also worth exploring. This essay investigates Svevo’s engagement with a comedy that has often been compared to Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. First, I consider the various cultural conduits through which Svevo would have received Shakespeare’s play to reveal the necessity of thinking about Svevo in the context of a broader European and even world literary culture. I then put Shakespeare’s play into conversation with Svevo’s La rigenerazione in order to explore Svevo’s rich representation of reality, of perception, and of performance itself.
Introduction to 'A Midsummer Night's Dream: Critical Appropriations' ed. Samrita Sengupta
Primarily designed as an introduction to a volume of critical essays on Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream this essay discusses the metatheatrical elements in this play and Shakespeare's ruminations on theatre in some of his other plays. It also draws analogies with painting and the aesthetic psychological significance of Bottom with the ass's head. it seeks to introduce new directions in interpreting the play.