My Place, My Shakespeare: Making Decentred Shakespeare(s) Through Site-Based Digital Performance in Brazil, Ghana and India
The main objective of the session is to explore the process of de-centring Shakespeare practice through the site-based digital performances of the Network as a way of addressing the key theme of WSC2026: Reconfiguring ‘Global’ Shakespeare.
By de-centred we mean to acknowledge, respect and celebrate the creative, professional and linguistic specificity of Shakespeare performance outside of English-speaking countries and cultures. This context foregrounds performers and the place of performance and explores the relationship with the Shakespeare text in a cultural landscape which is seeking to understand how to create an artistic response within a de-colonised conceptual space.
The work of the network to date has resulted in three projects across four continents:
Lockdown Shakespeare: Transnational Explorations and Decolonial Process (2021);
Process and Product: India-Ghana-Brazil-Scotland Inter-cultural Shakespeares (2021); and
Pericles on the Seas (2022). All network members are developing and making practice and research for the live project, My Place, My Shakespeare (forthcoming summer 2025) which will also form a key foundation of the panel at the WSC2026.
The central questions and problems which will drive the discussions and demonstrations of digital performance will be:
– What is the sound of Shakespeare in my voice, in my mother tongue?
What does Shakespeare mean in the place where I live and work?
What does Shakespeare mean to my culture?
The practitioners within the network will respond to these prompts by considering and problematising how they have positioned their local environment as the starting point and inspiration for interpreting the text, weaving in signifiers of local identity, language and location as a means of reinterpreting and repositioning Shakespeare. They will discuss how the significance of Shakespeare in performance is found through a deep knowledge and engagement with the local and specific, which then leads to the universal.
As well as exploring the products of the various digital performance projects at the centre of the network, this WSC2026 panel will also explore and demonstrate how the ubiquity of digital technology has enabled collaboration during the preparation, rehearsal, and delivery of decolonised Shakespeare performance between artists, communities, and researchers across four continents.
Finally, the network will discuss and demonstrate how this working methodology has created a permanent, open access record of this unique, de-centred project for future collaborators to see, as well as being used as a teaching resource across multiple countries. This will steer a discussion as to the current process of de-colonising curricula and ask questions of the commitment within Higher Education and the performing arts industry to supporting and spotlighting Shakespeare artists and scholars outside of the English-speaking world.