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).

In a new blog series, Cymbeline in the Anthropocene will be highlighting past performances of Cymbeline around the world--whether they were performed in theatres, on film, or myriad outdoor locations. First in this series is the Bard in the Barracks' summer 2016 Cymbeline in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, as presented by director Len Falkenstein. If you wish to suggest another Cymbeline for us to feature, please be in touch via our contact page, or on Twitter or Instagram @ecocymbeline!

It has been over three weeks since Black Lives Matter protests began after the killing of American George Floyd, and resistance to police violence and racism is growing across the globe, with demonstrations still going strong in all fifty American states, as well as in dozens of countries across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Though social movements such as Black Lives Matter are not usually seen to address climate crisis, there is a growing urgency to consider racism an ecological issue—including in the theatre, and in Shakespeare ecocriticism studies.

As numerous theatres and arts organizations take action in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, Shakespeare's Globe has joined the global movement.

From the Welsh countryside to your computer screens, our collaborators at the Willow Globe theatre are bringing more Cymbeline online. 

This coming Monday, June 15th, the Willow Globe will be hosting a Q&A session on between actor Jamie Wilkes and Welsh history expert Gavin Hooson. Click here to visit the Shakespeare Link website and register for this free event!

For anyone who missed the live broadcast on Earth Day, a virtual performance of our collaborator Gretchen Minton's ecodramaturgical piece Timon of Anaconda can now be viewed on Youtube. Presented by Bozeman Arts Live, this recording reunites the original cast for a socially distanced performance now available to audiences across the planet.