Illegal LEGO® Builds: Playing Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (81856)
Session Chair: James Moy
Saturday, 13 July 2024 09:55
Session: Session 1
Room: G10 (Ground)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
This paper addresses the question: how can theatre practitioners perform Shakespeare in a critically engaged way in the twenty-first century? In the twentieth century, Shakespeare performance was often characterised by a focus on textual analysis, verse-speaking, and fidelity to the playwright's perceived intentions. This approach is illustrated in John Barton’s highly influential 1984 guide to staging Shakespeare, Playing Shakespeare. In contrast, many twenty-first-century performers take a critical and interrogative approach to Shakespeare, focusing on de-colonisation, deconstruction, and revision. These changes to theatre practice signal the need for a new and targeted methodology for performing Shakespeare. In this paper, I draw on my observations of professional Australian Shakespeare rehearsals to illustrate the need for such a methodology. I demonstrate how contemporary practitioners, in an attempt to de-emphasise the authority of the text and playwright, at times ignore or do not recognise important structural attributes of Shakespeare's plays. Building on W.B. Worthen's theory of tools and technologies, and using the analogy of LEGO bricks, I outline a new methodology for performing Shakespeare. This methodology re-emphasises close engagement with the text, but does not equate such engagement with complicity or "fidelity". Rather, it equips performers to make use of Shakespeare's words as materials in critically engaged performances. These performances open up and enter into rigorous, two-way conversations, both with the text and with its performance history.
Authors:
Caitlin West, University of Queensland, Australia
About the Presenter(s)
Ms Caitlin West is a University Doctoral Student at University of Queensland in Australia
See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule
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