OPEN SESSIONS - SHOWS
O2. Отело
21 July 2026
Teatro Scientifico-Teatro Laboratorio, 6 pm
23 July 2026
Teatro Scientifico-Teatro Laboratorio, 9 pm
MAX NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 75
Отело (Othello) is an immersive lecture-performance by Petra Bjelica (University of Verona/Threepenny Company, Serbia) that reinterprets Shakespeare’s tragedy through a contemporary Balkan lens, utilizing augmented reality (AR) and live biodata as its core scenography. The performers’ biodata—breath, pulse, movement—is translated in real-time into a responsive digital environment, forming a ‘digital net’ that materially embodies Iago’s manipulative schemes. This technological framework drives the production’s central interrogation: Is truth visible? Is the visible real? By focusing on the male gaze and the control of bodies, the performance critically explores the construction of Balkan identity, ultimately asking: if Balkan masculinity is framed as Europe’s ‘barbaric other’, how then is femininity positioned as the ‘other’s other’?
Part of the project PNRR per la Miss.4, Comp.2, Inv.1.2, funded by European Union –NextGenerationEU–Prog. Balkan Gender Issues in contemporary Serbian Shakespeare: The use of Augmented Reality and Digital Scenography
O3. Antony and Cleopatra
22 July 2026
Teatro Scientifico – Teatro Laboratorio, 6 pm
MAX NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 75
Production: V.enice S.hakespeare C.ompany (Italy)
AD, V.enice S.hakespeare C.ompany – artistic director: Elena Pellone
Sound designer/actor: Sarah Sayeed
Lighting designer/set designer: Philippe Berthome
Dramaturg: David Schalkwyk
Starring Andrew French
A new production experimentally and experientially prepared without a single director, to create an egalitarian, actor-led creative process similar to how Shakespeare’s theatre worked. The production is multilingual and intercultural – main languages will be Italian and English – with artists from the UK and continental Europe. It will use Shakespeare’s text as a starting point, but will be cut and improvised, focusing on interdisciplinary approaches and cross-cultural influences. The elements of sand and water will take the place of furniture and inhibiting sets allowing for the fluidity and metaphorical story telling of Shakespeare’s words. We will draw on the theme of the WSC to use the planetary spheres in the sound design and change the worlds through a sound scape. This will be an intimate re-telling of an epic story. This script-in-hand performance laboratory. Bringing to life the humanity of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but also speaking to the terrifying rise of imperialist expansion, invasion and conquest, by narcissistic autocracies in the current world order.
O4. turning the green one red – A Devised Adaptation of Macbeth
25 July 2026
Teatro Fucina Culturale Machiavelli, 4 pm
Directed by Jaq Bessell and Andrea Coppone
With the students of the SaM – Shakespeare and the Mediterranean Summer School 2026
Actors in training at undergraduate and masters level will spend a week together devising a response to Macbeth, incorporating live and recorded sound, movement, and text. Led by Jaq Bessell and Andrea Coppone, the work will include various physical theatre techniques and will culminate in a 30 minute sharing of the work at Teatro Fucina Culturale Machiavelli.
OPEN SESSIONS - OTHER EVENTS
O1. GABRIEL EGAN AND HEEJIN KIM. AI for Shakespearean Research
25 July 2026
Polo Zanotto, T1, 11:15am – 12:30pm
This hands-on and demonstration event is intended to show what is possible in the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) by researchers seeking to generate new knowledge in the field of early modern drama. Our concern is with how researchers can train and/or fine-tune their own models to address their own particular research questions. The session will start with an overview of how LLMs work before getting into the details of fine-tuning one and discovering exactly how it reached its decisions (the well-known interpretability/explainability problem).
1. WHAT IS A LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL AND WHAT IS ‘TRAINING’? by Gabriel Egan (Minutes 1-15).
1.1 Building a Markov Chain of probabilities from a short text
1.2 Markov Chains expressed as matrices
1.3 Neural networks and back propagation
2. USING WORD EMBEDDING TO CAPTURE MEANING by Gabriel Egan (Minutes 16-35).
2.1 Audience hands-on with Word Embedding handout
2.2 Meanings as directions in high-dimensional space
2.3 Hands-on demo of Word2Vec on Google Colab
3. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO “FINE-TUNE” A LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL? by Heejin Kim (Minutes 36-50).
3.1 Fine-tuning as neural stylometry
3.2 Learning stylistic contrasts from early modern drama
3.3 What fine-tuning reveals that bag-of-words models cannot
4. HOW CAN WE GET A LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL TO EXPLAIN ITS OWN WORKING? by Heejin Kim (Minutes 51-70).
4.1 The black-box problem in computational literary studies
4.2 Interpreting neural decisions at the passage level
4.3 Testing explanations rather than trusting them
O5. BAOYI BI, WENXUAN HE. Incubating New Classics: Shakespeare and Chinese Literature in Cross-Media Performance. Fusion Theatre Practices in the Digital Age
22 July 2026
Polo Santa Marta, SMT-01, 2pm-3:15pm
Delegates: Jilan Dai, Chunli Zhang, Xiaorui Hao, Xiaoxia Yang, Zhen Qin, Junye Zhang, Ranqing Jin, Yitian Zhang
Held in Verona—the city symbolically associated with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—this forum takes Shakespeare as a model of intercultural adaptation in order to explore how classical literature may undergo cross-media transformation in the digital age. For more than four centuries, Shakespeare’s plays have been continually reinterpreted across different cultural contexts and media technologies, from the early modern stage to cinema, and more recently to immersive digital forms such as virtual reality performance and AI-driven interactive storytelling. The remarkable adaptability and global circulation of Shakespeare’s works offer a compelling reference for understanding how canonical texts acquire renewed cultural life through technological change and intercultural exchange. Using Shakespeare’s long tradition of adaptation and global dissemination as a comparative framework, this forum places major works of Chinese classical literature—Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, and The Peony Pavilion—within the broader field of intercultural theatre studies. It explores how these texts might be reinterpreted through contemporary performance technologies and digital media. Particular attention is given to how artificial intelligence, projection mapping, real-time interactive systems, and virtual reality environments can expand the performative possibilities of classical narratives, allowing the poetic spaces, mythological imagination, and emotional dramaturgy of Chinese literature to enter into dialogue with the long-standing cross-media adaptation tradition of Shakespearean drama. Bringing together scholars, theatre directors, and digital artists, the forum aims to examine how theatre can function as a dynamic site where literary heritage and emerging technologies intersect. Inspired by Shakespeare’s global circulation and enduring adaptability, the forum further considers whether Chinese classical literature may similarly gain renewed cultural vitality through cross-media performance practices, enabling these works to participate more actively in international cultural exchange in the digital era and to generate new forms of ‘classics’ for contemporary audiences.
O6: “Take Hands with me”: Dancing Shakespeare in a Midsummer Night’s Dream
22 July 2026
Polo Zanotto, T1, 3:45pm-4:30pm
Sidia Fiorato in conversation with Davide Bombana, and Giulia Orlando, Niccolò Poggini – COB Compagnia Opus Ballet, Firenze