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SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

By Cymbeline Anthropocene on May 13, 2021 at 01:13 PM in Cymbeline and the World

As we announced last month, several Cymbeline in the Anthropocene collaborators gave presentations together at a roundtable hosted by the Shakespeare Association of America’s 49th annual conference. The roundtable, titles “Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session,” took place virtually on Friday, April 2nd.

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

Chaired by Robert N. Watson (University of California Los Angeles), the rountable presented short papers by and discussion between Nicolette Bethel (University of the Bahamas), Evelyn O’Malley (University of Exeter), Katie Brokaw (University of California Merced), and Randall Martin (University of New Brunswick). 

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

Nicolette Bethel’s paper, “Tempests and Tyrants: Shakespeare in the Hurricane” analyzed two productions by the Shakespeare in Paradise company that incorporated the ecological and political issues Bahamians have faced during hurricane seasons. The company’s production of The Tempest was played on a bleak set of dark skies and damaged trees, with particular engagement and criticism of Prospero’s forced enslavement of Ariel and Caliban—a resonant focus on an island still recovering from the intergenerational effects of colonialism and enslavement.

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

As Bethel says, using the frame of the hurricane and their immediate trauma created the opportunity for the company to “open a Bahamian dialogue with our colonizers, and to express our recent experience with hurricanes.” Shakespeare, as Bethel states, becomes in these productions both “a tool of resistance and a partner in creativity” for Bahamian theatre artists.

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

As roundtable chair Watson summarizes, Bethel “compellingly describes the way that climate change is attacking the Bahamas with the dual threat of rising seas and intensifying tropical cyclones using The Tempest and Macbeth.

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

Bethel’s research and work with Shakespeare in Paradise demonstrates “that lastingly oppressive political and cultural systems are usually intersectional with environmental problems, and not neatly separable from them.”

Next, Evelyn O’Malley presents “Atmospheric Theatre: Pericles’ Windy Dramaturgy,” a paper co-authored with Chloe Preedy, also of the University of Exeter.

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

This paper significantly features some of the research that formed the basis for O’Malley’s recent monograph, Weathering Shakespeare: Audiences and Open-Air Performance, and features the Willow Globe theatre in Wales as its main case study. Documenting the co-incidences of physical winds in the Willow Globe’s porous, outdoor willow enclosure and the metaphorical winds spoken into being by Shakespearean actors, O’Malley and Preedy elaborate a poetic theory of wind as an ecological force that is ever-present and foundational to performance.

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

In Watson’s closing comments on this paper, he praises how O’Malley and Preedy take us “poetically and philosophically from wind as a force of destruction to wind as a force of creativity,” exposing the invisible but crucial dual function of air in performance in the conjunction of “the wind that drives plot with the breath of speech that drives a story to the audience.”

Katie Brokaw’s paper on her work as co-founder of both Shakespeare in Yosemite and the EarthShakes Alliance center the necessary collaborations between scientific research, Shakespeare performance, and environmental justice.

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

As Watson comments, what is so striking about Shakespeare in Yosemite’s performances is the contrast between “Yosemite [National Park], John Muir’s great temple and focal point for elite environmentalism, and the adjacent Northern San Joaquin Valley, whose struggling communities arguably endure the worst pollution levels in the United States.”

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

It is deeply significant that Shakespeare in Yosemite brings together the scholars, students, scientists and park rangers who live in this region of ecological extremes to perform in collaboration.  

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

As Katie writes, the works of Shakespeare are especially well suited to ecological theatre because they “represent an open access and infinitely renewable cultural resource. Unlike fossil fuels or animal species, Shakespearea’s texts are inexhaustible and invulnerable. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s texts are acutely attuned to the relationships between human beings and nature, frequently demonstrating their interdependency.

Lastly, Cymbeline in the Anthropocene’s project leader Randall Martin presents on the very project that hosts this blog. By linking performance to the urgency of ecological action, comments Watson, this project invites us to “think of the biosphere less as a stable book from our parents’ libraries that we can just look at, and more as an ever-evanescent improvisational performance that like any good theater, requires a reading of the room, and including noticing who hasn’t been invited into the room—but also, like improvisational theatre requires us to perform in each moment as a ‘yes, and,’ to the most recent expression of the performers around us, animate and inanimate.“ Watson’s generous assessment of our project resonates deeply with Martin’s assertion that “whoever controls today’s cultural narratives about the new era of human planetary domination will also determine the earth’s future;” we hope, of course, that our accent on collaboration will allow us to empower theatre companies all over the world to share that storytelling with their communities. 

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session

In the discussion portion of this roundtable, the urgency of collaboration across borders, generations, and species came to the fore. At one point the conversation turned to the intergenerational nature (pun intended) of the environmental movement: the way in which different generations will bring their innovations, experiences, and new knowledge and technologies to the movement, as perhaps best exemplified by young climate activists like Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and many others. 

Brokaw reminded the panel and audience that students are some of our most important collaborators: “I just worked with 50 Gen-Z-ers, and I cannot recommend collaborating with 20yr olds highly enough,” she explained, referring to her recent work filming Imogen in the Wild for Shakespeare in Yosemite. “The urgency that they face, the knowledge that they have, and in some cases the environmental injustices that they have faced in their own lives—not to mention the skill set that they bring in terms of understanding media—today’s media—in a way that we don’t makes them really ideal collaborators in a way that is life-affirming, wonderful, and profound.”

Lastly, the discussion turned to the recent preponderance of Shakespeare’s late plays in ecodramaturgical productions. “There is a movement towards these stories of improbable survival through all these wildly unleashed natural elements,” stated Watson about plays like The Tempest, Timon of Athens, and Cymbeline; it is as though theatre-makers are specifically preoccupied with plays that, like our current climate, “[question] whether or not these scenarios are survivable.”

Perhaps, as Martin responded, these late plays with “their supernatural, implausible elements are so sympathetic to current Anthropocene and environmental thinking” precisely because these elements, that for centuries seemed implausible, correspond to the strangeness of our contemporary environment. Preternaturally powerful storms, plagues, and environmental damage no longer seem supernatural in the Anthropocene, but remind us how urgent our environmental actions and artwords must be.

SAA 2021 Roundtable: Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session