Panel 20: Moving Shakespeare: Approaches in Choreographing Shakespeare

Schedule / Horaire

Tuesday 22 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: V115/V116.

Leader / Organisatrice

Marisa C. Hayes, Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne (France/USA)

Participants

  1. Sidia Fiorato, University of Verona (Italy)
    From Verbal to Visual Aesthetics: Remediating Shakespeare Through the Dancing Body
  2. Lorelle Browning, Pacific University (USA)
    Adapting Shakespeare’s Rhythmic Structure to Movement
  3. Freya Vass-Rhee, PhD, University of Kent (UK)
    Hamlet and the Creation of William Forsythe’s Sider

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Sidia Fiorato, University of Verona (Italy)
From Verbal to Visual Aesthetics: Remediating Shakespeare Through the Dancing Body

In the transition from linguistic to visual aesthetics, the dancing body becomes the medium for narration, and therefore an active participant in the creation of meaning. The body takes on the shape of the character’s thoughts, and, at the same time, moves beyond words themselves and expresses unconscious feelings. It thus interacts with the written word in an interdisciplinary dialogue in the effort both to tell stories and to reflect on the telling of those stories. My paper will focus on the choice of dance movements for Shakespeare’s verses in the main scenes of balletic renderings of Romeo and Juliet.

2. Lorelle Browning, Pacific University (USA)
Adapting Shakespeare’s Rhythmic Structure to Movement

Since the late 19th century, when the Departments of Rhetoric crowned Shakespeare as “the greatest poet in English,” criticism of Shakespeare’s plays has primarily been focused on “words, words, words” and critical concentration on historical and biographical aspects of the plays has been replaced by analysis of the content and patterns of his language. Yet as performance art—written for artists, not readers—I argue that the language and structure of the scripts were crafted to create rhythms that imitate their sense in performance, rhythms that are the equivalent of a score in music, providing an essential accompaniment to the language and action.

3. Freya Vass-Rhee, PhD, University of Kent (UK)
Hamlet and the Creation of William Forsythe’s Sider

A humorous chance occurrence during a rehearsal session catalyzed choreographer William Forsythe’s choice to use the soundtrack of a filmed version of Hamlet as the sonic substrate for a 2011 work that would be titled Sider. The film’s soundtrack, however, is not audible to the audience but only to the performers, who hear it through earphones. This paper tracks the 7-week process of devising Sider, revealing how the text, narrative and dramaturgy of Hamlet resonated with and extended the production’s unconventional starting points, yielded visuo-sonic compositional impulses, and reflect Forsythe’s career-long interrogation of theatrical economies of meaning.