This week’s blog features some brilliantly inventive engagement with our project website by Cornell University students. Under the course leadership of Professor Theo Black, Cornell’s PMA 3801 acting ensemble, joined by two additional guest artists, have created a daring beautiful, rollicking, and provocative postmodern adaptation entitled “Once Upon a Time in … The Anthropocene.”

In today’s blog, Sofia Andom chats to us about her journey into performing Imogen in Shakespeare in Yosemite’s feature-film Cymbeline adaptation, Imogen in the Wild.

This week we follow up our May 17 performance announcement for the opening of Montana Shakespeare in the Parks’s production of Cymbeline on 16 June with an interview with company dramaturge, Gretchen Minton. Read on for insights about the unique history of this amazing company, how they are coping with the challenges of performing in-person during the ongoing pandemic, and their bio-regional vision for the production.

After last week’s post examined “Performing Shakespeare in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Global Roundtable Session,” the Cymbeline in the Anthropocene wanted to highlight one more session from the Shakespeare Association of America’s 49th annual conference, which took place at the beginning of April. Chaired by Kim Hall, “Shakespeare Futures: Ecology and Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies” eschewed a conventional panel structure to create an innovative, jointly-authored collaboration between four scholars. To echo the collaborative structure of this important presentation, Cymbeline in the Anthropocene’s discussion of it is presented as a conversation between project leader Randall Martin and graduate researcher Rebecca Salazar. 

Cymbeline in the Anthropocene is excited to announce the second production by our collaborating theatres: Montana Shakespeare in the Parks. Their adaptation of Cymbeline for performance by eight actors will be directed by Artistic Director Kevin Asselin. The script will be prepared and the production dramaturged by Company dramaturge Gretchen Minton. MSIP will tour 37 performances to an astonishing 33 locations around Montana and neighbouring states between 16 June and 8 Sept.

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. 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). 

Over the last few weeks, the Cymbeline in the Anthropocene blog has been following the newly released video previews of Shakespeare in Yosemite’s film production, Imogen in the Wild. In the first week we reviewed the production’s original music videos, and last week’s selection featured scenes that hint at the character development of one of the play’s villains, Iachimo. This week, in our final installment (for now!), we examine two more scene previews that expose the play’s engagement with contrasting masculinities and the way they relate to the environment.

April was a month of riches for Cymbeline in the Anthropocene! Between the excitement of Rob Conkie’s Melbourne Cymbeline and the Globe 4 Globe symposium last month, Shakespeare in Yosemite released eight video previews of their production, Imogen in the Wild, on Earth Day. Last week, this blog presented the original music videos among these, and today, we feature a group of scene previews featuring Cymbeline’s wiliest villain: Iachimo.

In April, Globe 4 Globe: Shakespeare and Climate Emergency became the first international symposium to address this increasingly pressing topic. Co-organized by Katie Brokaw, Paul Prescott, and the Research Department at Shakespeare’s Globe, the event brought together more than 30 theatre-makers, scholars, and sustainability experts, who presented culturally and theatrically diverse papers on eco-Shakespeare in performance, with a particular emphasis on its relationships with the deepening climate crisis. The breadth of artistic concepts and dramaturgical approaches makes it challenging to summarise the conference’s key takeaways. Nonetheless, three broad themes emerged: relations to place, sustainable practices, and environmental justice.

Cymbeline in the Anthropocene's project leader Randall Martin recently guest starred in Nicole Asquith's podcast In the Weeds, which explores human relationships with the environment through our cultivation of plants. In a month full of Cymbeline happenings, Randall takes a detour through a suspiciously English "Athenian" wood to speak about the forests of A Midsummer Night's Dream.