Shakespeare and Community Performance
Description
This book explores how productions of Shakespearean plays create meaning in specific communities, with special attention to issues of access, adaptation, and activism. Instead of focusing on large professional companies, it analyzes performances put on by community theatres and grassroots companies, and in applied drama projects. It looks at Shakespearean productions created by marginalized populations in Greater London, Harlem, and Los Angeles, a Hamlet staged in the remote Faroe Islands, and eco-theatre made in California's Yosemite National Park. The book investigates why different communities perform Shakespeare, and what challenges, opportunities, and triumphs accompany the processes of theatrical production for both the artists and the communities in which they are embedded.
Reviews / Votes
"In Shakespeare and Community Performance, Katherine Steele Brokaw embeds herself - as director, performer, teacher, researcher, interviewer, audience member - within communities of Shakespearean theatrical production in order to recount vitally important local and global performance histories. Each case study - ranging from community collaboration with major companies, too all-female ensembles, to a remarkable Faroese Hamlet, to the author's own practice with eco-Shakespeare - is exhaustively contextualized and makes a powerful cumulative argument that community Shakespeare draws much of its force from the boldness of its necessarily adaptive strategies." (Rob Conkie, University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
"This is Shakespeare out and about in the world, serving as connective material that is adaptive and adapted to community concerns. The book is filled with examples of radical inclusivity of people, places and priorities, and often surprising interactions with local cultural contexts. Brokaw's work is deeply informed, and deeply generous." (Kevin Ewert, Professor of Theatre, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford)
"A deeply knowledgeable scholar who leads with her heart, Katherine Steele Brokaw offers a keen understanding of why practitioners like myself have devised radically inclusive approaches to performing and presenting Shakespeare. This book opens a door to a world of Shakespearean exploration that has grown up outside of countless white, male, heteronormative interpretations, which have, for a long time, been looked to almost exclusively as 'what should happen onstage'. In my decades of cross-gender, culturally inclusive theatrical production, there has never been a more direct, powerful reporting on my legacy than that which Dr. Brokaw and her team of researchers present herein." (Lisa Wolpe, actor and director, founder of L.A. Women's Shakespeare Company)
"Katherine Steele Brokaw's Shakespeare and Community Performance is a richly insightful and evocative account of the creativity of people invited to stage Shakespearean texts in their communities. Rigorously researched and beautifully written, Brokaw's book offers an empathetic analysis of productions in places as different as New York and London, Los Angeles and Harlem, the Faroe Islands, Merced, and Yosemite. This inspiring book makes a compelling case for expanding and rethinking perceptions of Shakespearean performance as a way to imagine a kinder, more collaborative and resilient future." (Helen Nicholson, Royal Holloway, University of London)
"Passionately committed to public transformation, this copiously documented book proposes mobilizing locally adapted and accessible Shakespeare to create socially inclusive theatre-making for the precarious twenty-first century. At once a manifesto of pro-active empathy, a dazzling showcase of fearless artistry from Los Angeles to the Faroe Islands, and an inspiring guide to leading personal and company journeys through Shakespeare, Katherine Steele Brokaw declares 'Yes! you can do Shakespeare!' whatever your background or identity while serving your community and changing lives, including your own." (Randall Martin, University of New Brunswick)
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Person
Katherine Steele Brokaw is associate professor of English and Theatre at University of California Merced, USA, co-founding artistic director of Shakespeare in Yosemite, and co-founder of the EarthShakes Alliance. She is the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early English Drama (2016) and has published articles and reviews in several journals and essay collections. With Jay Zysk she co-edited Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare (2019), and she edited Macbeth for the Arden Performance Editions series (2019).
Content
1. Community Shakespeare: Access, Adaptation, Activism.- 2. Public Shakespeare: Public Works (New York City) and Public Acts (UK).- 3. Identity Shakespeare: L.A. Women's Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Festival.- 4. Island Shakespeare: Hamlet in the Faroe Islands.- 5. Ecological Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Yosemite and the EarthShakes Alliance.
