K.01 Shormishtha Panja
Macbeth Visits Manipur: Merging of Politics and Indigenous Performance Traditions in Manipuri Shakespeare
21 July 2026

This presentation deals with two Macbeth performances in the north-eastern state of Manipur in India, one by Ratan Thiyam, the other by Lokendra Arambam. The discussion of these performances is embedded in an analysis of the rich and complex indigenous pre-colonial, pre -Hindu and Hindu myths and performance protocols of Manipur. The myths encompass a circular rather than linear view of history and foreground a close relation between nature and human beings. The performance protocols of Lai Haraoba (worship of ancestors), Nata Sankirtana (musical and dramatic performances about the Hindu God Krishna and his paramour Radha), Shumang Leela (politically charged dramatic performance by cross-dressed men) and the martial art of Thang Ta establish a completely new language and emotional choreography for the Shakespeare text. Thiyam and Arambam express political criticism of the neo-colonial energies of the Indian state through their interpretation of Macbeth and break out of the shackles of the western proscenium stage by staging a play, magically, on water.

K.02 Jason Allen-Paisant
Oceanic Fathers: Othello and the Work of Voice 
23 July 2026

In “Oceanic Fathers: Othello and the Work of Voice”, Jason Allen-Paisant will bring together psychoanalytic and critical theory, and lived artistic practice, to rethink what it means to inhabit Shakespeare’s most charged role. Drawing on Self-Portrait as Othello, he explores how Othello has functioned not only as a theatrical character but as a symbolic demand placed on Black performance: a role asked to stabilize European ideas of law, authority, masculinity, and coherence. Against psychoanalytic traditions that presume a universal paternal order, the lecture asks what happens when that symbolic anchor is historically absent or violently foreclosed, as it has been for Black life shaped by slavery, colonial rupture, and diasporic dislocation. Returning to Othello through this lens, the lecture traces how Black performance invents other ways of organizing meaning and survival: through sound, breath, prayer, song, mysticism, and what Allen-Paisant calls a training of feeling. Looking at Shakeskeare’s play through these alternative epistemologies, the talk reframes performance not as representation alone, but as endurance under pressure — a mode of self-making and speaking that comes to life when inherited grammars fail.

K.03 Piero Boitani
Stellar Shakespeare
25 July 2026

We begin with the discovery of Uranus in 1781 and of its (so far) twenty-nine moons in the period of time between 1786 and 2025. Six of these were named after characters in Pope’s Rape of the Lock; but the remaining twenty-three after characters in Shakespeare’s plays, from Miranda to Juliet, Portia, and Rosalind. What does this shift from classical mythology (dominating up to the names of Saturn’s satellites) to the Shakespearean imaginaire mean? Instead of answering this question I move via Hamlet, who becomes a star only in the twentieth century, to stars in some of Shakespeare’s plays, namely in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice, and explore the way in which astronomy and astrology – in the form of a cosmic view, a topos and the paradigm of human destiny, finally a Nocturne and the music of the spheres, determine the ultimate direction and meaning of a play.  This constitutes a first, more traditional way, in which Shakespeare is stellar. But there may be a second, more innovative, one – that of applying astro-criticism to the study of his plays and his characters. I pick up the question left unanswered earlier and make a few suggestions, ending with a German surprise.