The University of Birmingham at The Other Place

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Postgraduate study in Shakespeare: an open day in Stratford-upon-Avon

On Saturday 2 March 2019, we are opening the doors to both The Shakespeare Institute and The Other Place, and our unique collaboration, to invite prospective postgraduate students to learn more about our range of innovative study opportunities for September 2019 and beyond.

This event is for prospective postgraduate students interested in developing or advancing careers in creative or academic fields – from teaching and lecturing to writing, acting or directing – as well as anyone with an interest in Shakespeare. It will give you a taster of postgraduate study with The Shakespeare Institute, access to RSC experts and The Other Place itself, and a chance to hear first-hand what it is like to study in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Further information and booking

Photo by Sam Allard (c)RSC

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Are you interested in pursuing Postgraduate Study with us? We have a range of postgraduate courses which you can check out here: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/shakespeare/courses/index.aspx

Photography by Sam Allard ©

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Some shots of the research behind ‘Interregnum’ in February 2017. 

Photos by Patricia Crummay ©

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Some shots of our Postgraduate Open Day last year! Keep an eye out for 2018′s. - Photos by Sam Allard ©

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Some wonderful moments of our Stratford Residential 2018 - Photos by Sam Allard ©

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Photo by Sam Allard (c) RSC

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Photo by Sam Allard (c) RSC

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Three Questions about Institutions: Corinne Furness

PROVOCATION: INSTITUTIONS

Corinne Furness is an AHRC funded doctoral researcher with the University of Birmingham and the Royal Shakespeare Company, researching professional-amateur collaboration and A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Play for the Nation. 

Co-Director of community theatre company Eager Spark, she is more widely interested in the intersection of research and practice, and recently collaborated with Stage Directors UK to produce their 2016-2017 gender audit of theatres in England. Corinne is attending the conference as a Radical Mischief scribe. 

Photo credit -  Estelle Buckridge

1) In your view, what are some of the structural and/or political problems and challenges facing contemporary British theatre as an institution?

The funding system which underpins contemporary British theatre still largely works from the model established by John Maynard Keynes, the first chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Reflecting Keynes’ personal preferences, seventy years of funding policy have associated excellence with the professional, placing everyone else as consumers of rather than the makers of theatre. Meanwhile, the funding bias towards London (which has not been successfully countered) has established London as the centre of British theatre and everything else as the margins. In funding terms there's no such thing as British theatre as it's all devolved, so what follows is firmly in the context of England.

On a resolutely practical level, those who run our theatrical institutions are not reflective of wider English society. The unpaid labour of new artists (and indeed of mid-career artists), the low paid entry level jobs, the need to live in a handful of large cities, the funding bias to building based organisations - this all creates a situation which restricts those who can participate, even before we consider other intersectional factors.

2) What does your experience as a practitioner and researcher suggest can or should be done to address some of these problems and challenges? 

We should address the fact that professional and amateur are not binary, but actually a spectrum. We should look to UK Sport where participation in sport is a fundamental part of national policy and see how we might create a policy that enshrines participation as being equal to (and not less than) professional theatre. We need to accept that addressing the regional imbalance of funding is going to require radical solutions (which should not simply be based around funding building based organisations) and to do this some previously well-funded organisations will have to have their funding cut.    

All organisations in receipt of public funding should do nuanced audits in relation to gender, race, and disability of their creatives (onstage and off) and management teams. By nuanced, this means that it isn’t enough if you’ve a 50/50 gender split but women only direct shows in your studio theatre or 35% of your actors are people of colour but they’re only ever cast as servants or ensemble. These audits should be publicly available and there should be reductions in funding for those organisations who don’t make significant progress over an agreed time period (with severest penalties for those funded at national levels). I think it should we should be very clear: by all means produce a play with a cast of eighteen men and four women but don’t expect to do so on public funding.

3) Are there particular projects you have been involved with or written about which you feel are successfully confronting some of the institutional problems/biases/limitations of contemporary British theatre?

A lot of the headlines surrounding the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2016 professional-amateur collaboration A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for the Nation were around the inclusion of amateurs in equal status roles to professional actors. Whilst I do think there are lessons to draw from how professional and amateur sectors might work together, I think the project poses equally as important questions regarding the role of touring and how a building based organisation might truly be national. By working not only with adult amateur groups but also local schools, the project presents a model of touring which allows depth of participation rather than simply breadth, and moves beyond theatre simply for consumption.

I’m also borderline evangelical about Slung Low who are fundamentally challenging the form of what a theatre company might be. From their work with non-professionals, through their living wage policy, to their creation of a Cultural Community College they consistently interrogate why how we do something is as important as what we do.    

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Three Questions about Institutions: Tobi Kyeremateng

PROVOCATION: INSTITUTIONS

Tobi Kyeremateng is a theatre, festival and live performance producer based in South West London, specialising in artist development, artistic collaboration and community engagement. She is currently Producer at Apples and Snakes, Executive Producer (Up Next) at Bush Theatre, and Programme Coordinator at Brainchild Festival.

Photo credit - Caleb Femi

1) In your view, what are some of the structural and/or political problems and challenges facing contemporary British theatre as an institution?

Contemporary British Theatre, as an institution, isn't contemporary. We are decades behind regarding the lack of shift in our structures of how theatre should be and run, the main challenges being artistic leadership; how we define it and how that then dictates who can do it. It's a given that theatre is still a very white industry. The financial burden of being an artist is normalised. In this case, 'British' is also synonymous with 'white London'. British theatre does not represent Britain. All of these are challenges British theatre faces.

2) What does your work as a producer suggest can or should be done to address some of these problems and challenges? 

I think my work is very get-up-and-go. If I want to do something, I'll have a conversation about it, then do it. Theatre tends to dwell on conversation a lot and there is little action. If we don't know what to do, then we should hire people that do. Transparency is another thing that's important to me. Institutions are not transparent about the things they want to achieve, are planning, are working on, and perhaps this is out of fear and not wanting to be held accountable by the public, but public institutions must allow for that to happen in order to create any kind of change. I also believe my work gives agency to everyday creatives (those who are yet to realise their creativity). I don't believe in keeping conversations within the bubble of the industry when the solutions also exist outside of us.

3) Are there particular projects you have worked on which you feel are successfully confronting some of the institutional problems/biases/limitations of contemporary British theatre?

I am currently working on a project looking at Black artistic leadership across the Diaspora. Artistic leadership needs redefining in order for us to shift forward and pave the way for new talent. The notion of an 'Artistic Director' is dated. In the UK, we only have one Black 'Artistic Director' of a major theatre venue (Kwame Kwei-Armah). He, alongside 5 others, make up all the Artistic Directors of Colour in the UK, out of 1300 or so venues. That's absolutely insane to me. The lack of Black artists at senior level management is worrying for me, and this project aims to deconstruct what artistic leadership is and also create a shared resource.

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‘Fire At Sea’ - Richard Wilson

PROVOCATION: VIOLENCE

Fifty years ago Jan Kott imagined Prospero’s island as a concentration camp: a ‘garden of torment’ designed by Bosch.[1]  [2] And The Tempest has lately acquired a deadly specificity from the uncanny coincidence that the most likely geographical analogue for the isle has indeed long been identified as Lampedusa: the tourist trap, midway between the play’s Tunis and Naples, voted the world’s best beach in 2013, that has become Europe’s purgatorial holding-centre for its African migrants.[3] Shakespeare read about a hermitage on the ‘fire island’ of Lampedusa in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, it has been claimed.[4] But, if so, Prospero’s fictional island has been changed utterly by its association with this factual place of terrible beauty.

Prospero’s account of the deportation of the ‘damned witch’ Sycorax from Algiers, when pregnant with her ‘freckled whelp’ Caliban, and abandonment on those deceptive sands ‘by the sailors’ [1,2,270-9], has been laden with horrific extra meaning due to the torture, rape and drowning of the boat-people of Lampedusa; and his image of a ‘rotten carcass of a butt’ is now shadowed by photos of the crammed hulks, with ‘Nor tackle, nor sail, nor mast’, that ‘the very rats have quit’, in which these Libyans or Somalians have been left ‘To cry to th’sea that roared’ [146-50]. ‘If you think they risk their lives on a boat that cannot even float’, remarked a captain in the Italian rescue operation called ‘Mare Nostrum’, ‘It opens your eyes to something you thought was different’, before he ‘tailed off, as if words cannot do justice’, The Guardian reported, to the catastrophe.[5] But it is to such a state of emergency in our sea that Shakespeare seems to want to open our eyes, when he has Miranda place responsibility for the disaster on her father’s art:

             If, by your art, my dearest father, you have

           Set the wild waters in this roar, allay them…

                                           O, I have suffered

            With those I saw suffer… O, the cry did knock

            Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perished.             

                                                                    [1,2,1-9]

 On October 27 2014 Baroness Anelay announced the British government would no longer support Mediterranean rescue operations, as ‘We believe they create an unintended “pull factor”, encouraging more migrants’. Prospero’s repeated call to ‘Come away, servant, come!... Approach my Ariel, come!’ [188-9], reminds us how much Europe’s power depends, however, on such ‘pull factors’, inducing guest-workers to enter, as Ariel sings, ‘Presently… Before you can say “Come” and “Go”, / And breathe twice, and cry, “So, so”, / Each one tripping on his toe / Will be here with mop and mow’ [4,1,42-7]. This is how he conjures a slave ‘at midnight’ from Bermuda [1,2,130]. The ‘direful spectacle of the wreck’ [26] that fronts The Tempest therefore signals that this will be a play not only about colonialism, racism and slavery, but also the strange immunitarian ethics of hosting, guesting, and repatriation, in a catastrophic time like our own, of terrorism, mass-migration and anxious waiting for barbarians [1,2,1-98; 197-225; 237].

 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the true Prince of the Isle of Fire from which he took his name, finished his own lecture on Shakespeare reflecting that in The Tempest we encounter Shakespeare as ‘the enchanter disenchanted’, whose last testament is that ‘my ending is despair’ [Epi, 15]. ‘Those are the final words the Lord of Smiles and Shadows addressed to us before his death’, is how the novelist rounded off his dark interpretation of the plays.[82] But Lampedusa’s lecture is here misleading, because these are not, of course, the last words of The Tempest. Prospero’s Epilogue continues that his ‘ending is despair’ unless he is ‘relieved by prayer / Which pierces so, that it assaults / Mercy itself, and frees all faults’. So the play in fact closes on an appeal that is truly Derridean, with the enjoinder that it is for us to complete the onward passage from this catastrophic shore: ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill’ [10-11]. ‘If we were all to accuse ourselves, there would no longer be an innocent person on earth’, the French philosopher and critic Jaques Derrida warned us in his own late work On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, given that ‘we are all heirs to persons or events marked by crimes against humanity’.[83] Yet that is precisely the endless deconstructive project on which Shakespeare now asks us to embark and ‘then take hands’:

         As you from crimes would pardoned be,

        Let your indulgence set me free.

Professor Richard Wilson is the Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London. His publications include Will Power, Secret Shakespeare, Shakespeare in French Theory, Free Will and Worldly Shakespeare. Influenced by continental philosophy, as well as Anglo-American criticism, he reads Shakespearean drama in terms of its agonistic conflict.

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‘Dreaming up your island’ - Madeline Sayet

PROVOCATION: VIOLENCE

One of the most exciting things about directing The Tempest is dreaming up your island. The director is free to choose how allegorical the setting may be. But directing The Tempest in the 21st century requires reflecting on the colonial paradigms intrinsic in the text and the relationship between its characters.

Colonialism and its structures are not a neutral state of being, but rather a specific hierarchical dynamic that Prospero has imposed upon the island, including the systemic disenfranchisement of the indigenous inhabitants he has forced into servitude - Caliban and Ariel – in a form of settler colonialism. In Act 1, Scene 2, when both Caliban and Ariel argue against the injustice of their treatment, Prospero is angry that they do not appreciate what he did to “save” them.

I first directed The Tempest in 2012. As a Mohegan, I was focused on the text’s relationship to the early 1600s in colonial America. I had seen many Calibans who weren’t human and felt the colonized islanders needed to reclaim their voice from the colonizers whose narrative had traditionally been central, especially at a time when not many new plays about Native peoples were being produced.

(Production poster by Elisabeth Ho)

Is Caliban a monster or a man? If he is a monster, what does it mean when they call him a man? If he is a man, what does it mean when they call him monster? Each character perceives and labels the others differently. Many textual references define Caliban as a man. The characters who call him monster (Trinculo/Stephano) do so in the context of wanting to sell him—a situation not uncommon for indigenous peoples in the 1600s. For this reason, I made him a member of my own Mohegan nation, whose livelihood traditionally depended on fish—thus explaining the moments when he is described as smelling like fish, to outsiders.

The text not only supported the choice to make Caliban a man, but a complex one, trying to find his way between cultures. Having personally suffered eurocentric language repression, my production was inspired by the question: What would happen if Caliban could get his Native language back? This was one of many ways in which decolonization was a core theme in the production. As Caliban started his freedom song (at the end of act 2, scene 2), he slowly remembered the Mohegan word for freedom: ‘Nayawiyuwok.’ This was vital because in Mohegan we do not have a word for slavery.

Our production opened with a prologue spoken by Ariel, also in Mohegan, setting up this story as a traditional Mohegan tale of long ago. This helped decolonize the text and support the fact that, in the text, the foreign visitors leave the island at the end of the play. Ariel was represented by a flock of blackbirds, that could be in one place or many at any time, reminding us that the island and its spirits were also alive and it would take enormous strength for Prospero to control them. At the end of Caliban’s “the isle is full of noises” (3.2), Caliban glimpsed Ariel for just a moment and she whispered ‘Nayawiyuwok’ to him, emphasizing their shared language.

We also used a traditional Mohegan walking stick as Prospero’s staff—an item that clearly came from the woodlands, as it included a deer antler at the top. This made it very clear that this was something Prospero took from the island and from Sycorax. In act 1, scene 2 - when Caliban says “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me,” the presence of that staff made that truth very visceral. By making the island, the place we were in, and the indigenous language, the language of the land we were actually on—instead of somewhere far away—we shifted the sense of who was foreign and who was not in the production.

How we portray Caliban and Ariel is always a question of: who are we oppressing through these imposed structures? Settler colonialism is ongoing, and Shakespeare’s text references many colonized peoples. Personally, I am no longer willing to exist in a world where indigenous peoples are confined to playing Caliban and Ariel. Sometimes, we need allegorical tools to enable us to think further, beyond the limits of this world and ask bigger questions.

At the moment in time when you are directing The Tempest - how do your casting and design choices give voice to a more complex understanding of humanity and what connects us? Why is Prospero so afraid of Caliban reproducing, thus creating a nation of Calibans? Why is it that Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero, despite their differences, are all still textually capable of understanding love? If you find yourself taking sides, ask yourself: whose side are you on? And why?

 Madeline Sayet is a director of classics, new plays, and opera. She was recently named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 List in the Hollywood & Entertainment category, is a TED Fellow, a MIT Media Lab Director's Fellow, and a recipient of The White House Champion of Change Award. www.madelinesayet.com 

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Photo by Sam Allard © RSC

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Photo by Sam Allard © RSC

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Postgraduate study in Shakespeare: an open day in Stratford-upon-Avon

An event for prospective postgraduate students with an interest in Shakespeare.

The University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute is engaged in an exciting collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at The Other Place theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. On Saturday 12 May 2018, we are opening the doors to both The Shakespeare Institute and The Other Place, and our unique collaboration, to invite prospective postgraduate students to learn more about our range of innovative study opportunities for September 2018 and beyond.

The programme will start at The Shakespeare Institute before moving to The Other Place, a short walk away, for the afternoon.

This event is for prospective postgraduate students interested in developing or advancing careers in creative or academic fields – from teaching and lecturing to writing, acting or directing – as well as anyone with an interest in Shakespeare. It will give you a taster of postgraduate study with The Shakespeare Institute, access to RSC experts and The Other Place itself, and a chance to hear first-hand what it is like to study in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Arrival at The Shakespeare Institute is from 10.15am, for an 10.45am start.

The programme includes:

An overview of the postgraduate programmes available at The Shakespeare Institute, and the opportunities for postgraduates to work with the RSC.

A choice of workshop taster sessions with University of Birmingham and RSC practitioners, focused on education, performance or research

An original performance from Shakespeare and Creativity MA students, developed as part of their programme

The opportunity to ask your own questions about postgraduate study and have them answered by current and former Shakespeare Institute students and members of University of Birmingham and RSC staff

Practical advice on applying for, and funding, postgraduate study.

Lunch and refreshments will be available.

For a flavour of what you can expect, take a look at our gallery of images from the 2017 Open Afternoon at The Other Place.

Book your place Tickets are free but must be booked in advance through our Eventbrite page at: 

https://shakespeareopenday.eventbrite.co.uk

A full agenda will be sent to all registered attendees before the event.

The booking deadline is Tuesday 1 May 2018. Please note that spaces are limited and places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Photo by Sam Allard (c) RSC

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Shakespeare’s Emotions, Lost and Found

On Friday, November 17th, more than 60 Shakespeare students, scholars, theatre practitioners, and enthusiasts gathered at The Other Place Theatre to discuss emotion in Shakespeare’s plays. This educational event, called ‘Shakespeare’s Emotions, Lost and Found’, formed part of the nationwide Being Human Festival, which ran from 17-25 November and showcased research in the humanities in more than 45 UK cities and towns. In Stratford, ‘Shakespeare’s Emotions’ was organized and supported by the collaboration between the RSC and the University of Birmingham, with further support from the British Shakespeare Association.

The event began with a half-hour panel chaired by Dr Daisy Murray and featuring academics associated with the University of Birmingham and theatre practitioners and audience analysts from the RSC. Dr Erin Sullivan and Dr Kerry Cooke spoke about understandings of emotion in Shakespeare’s time, as well as the ways in which performing the plays on stage creates a complex emotional relationship between performers, characters, audiences, and text. Matt Dann and Esh Alladi, both part of the RSC’s current production of Twelfth Night, in turn reflected on the role of emotion in the rehearsal room and the kinds of emotional journeys actors experience as they acquaint themselves with a new role. Becky Loftus, Head of Audience Insight at the RSC, finished things off by speaking about a study that the theatre conducted into audiences’ emotional responses to live theatre, cinema broadcasts of theatre, and 360° VR theatre (more on that study available here). 

In the second half-hour, the audience broke into small groups and looked at a selection of emotional passages from Shakespeare chosen by each member of the panel. Each group was led by a PhD student in Shakespeare studies who served as a discussion facilitator, inviting participants to talk through the emotional experiences, ideas, metaphors, and scenarios depicted in their passage. For many audience members, the chance to become actively involved in small-group discussion was a particular highlight: ‘working in small groups to further discuss emotions as well as listening to other people’s ideas’ was especially enriching, one A-level student commented, while an undergraduate reflected on how the ‘opportunity to read an extract in group work before and after our analytical discussion’ encouraged him to think more deeply about ‘how dialogue changed with added knowledge of its context’.Attendees at the event weren’t the only ones who found the small-group discussions beneficial. 

The five PhD facilitators, whose involvement was made possible by a British Shakespeare Association small event award, spoke afterwards how the event helped them develop new ideas and skills: ‘Participating in the “Shakespeare’s Emotions: Lost and Found” event gave me practical and valuable experience in a teaching setting’; ‘It showed me that preparation is invaluable, and it was lovely working with a young group of students who had very creative and intelligent responses to the text’; ‘I was very pleased by the group’s happy surprise that our quite challenging passage had, in the course of the discussion, suddenly become not only intelligible but even emotionally resonant’; ‘Several students even stopped me on the way out to ask further questions and share more ideas’. The event offered these early career scholars the chance to develop their teaching and public engagement skills and to work with Shakespeare enthusiasts from a range of different backgrounds.

In the final half-hour of the session, representatives from each of the small groups and the opening panellists finished with short presentations and whole-group discussion about the varied role of emotion in Shakespeare. Students highlighted key ideas discussed in relation to their passages, including the way specific words and images help shape emotion, the way performance turns emotion into a very social and at times tense event, and how historical differences in ideas about emotion can give us new insights into how culture shapes human experience. As the event came to a close, many participants hurried off to grab a quick dinner and then to take their seat for the RSC’s evening performance of Twelfth Night – no doubt resulting in even more emotional experiences and ideas after an already very passionate afternoon!

Blog post by Dr Erin Sullivan, photos by Gina Print © RSC.

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Photo by Gina Print © RSC.

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Photo by Gina Print © RSC.