At the first ever Cymbeline in the Anthropocene meeting in January, our collaborators gathered in Santa Barbara, California, to exchange ideas. After the first day of introductions, directors and actors took to the stage to experiment with sections of Cymbeline in person. One result was a staging by actors of the local Lit Moon Theatre Company of the strangely beautiful burial of Fidele/Innogen during a thunderstorm, which merged ideas about ecological grief into the elegiac dialogue. Read Shakespeare in Yosemite co-director Katherine Steele Brokaw's thoughts on this scene below, and watch the video for a glimpse at what an ecodramaturgical Cymbeline might look like.

In the coming months, Cymbeline in the Anthropocene will be interviewing our collaborating directors to check on how their companies are adapting through the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Here is our first interview in the series, with Rob Conkie, who is based at La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia. Keep an eye on the blog for more interviews soon!

The ongoing shutdown of most theatres across the globe has not stopped theatre artists from creating innovative ways to engage with Shakespeare. Evelyn O'Malley, one of our collaborators through the Willow Globe theatre in the UK, is also a lecturer at the University of Exeter. When she and her students found themselves separated by pandemic measures, they channelled their discussion of Cymbeline into a visually and intellectually gorgeous collaborative zine. Read below for Evelyn's description of the project, and click the image below to download the Cymbelzine! 

Act II of the Willow Globe's Sharing Cymbeline project is now live on the Shakespeare Link website! Beginning with a discussion on Act II by directors Susanna Best and Philip Bowen, the new videos include video performances of excerpts from Cymbeline by members of the community. Highlights include some familiar faces from the Act I selections, and a particularly spooky Iachimo.

Shakespearean whimsy and pandemic anxieties are animated in “A Midsummer Night’s Quarantine,” a recent co-production of Lit Moon Pictures and Stanislavsky Films. The video offers a glimpse of how actors in Santa Barbara, USA, and Karaganda, Kazakhstan, are coping with social isolation in their respective spaces... and how Shakespeare’s most mischievous characters emerge from the actors’ quarantine activities (or lack thereof).