Conference Details

Decentering Shakespeare is a developing area of scholarship and practice, born from a greater engagement with digital practices that emerged from lockdown and clear need to develop a Shakespeare scholarship fit for the 21st century.

This event builds on the Global Shakespeares event hosted by the Performance Research and Practice Cluster at UWS in 2021 and is facilitated by the actor, director, creative producer, and explorer of Shakespeare original and modern rehearsal and production practice expert, Ben Crystal and Lead Researcher of the Decentred Shakespeares Network, Dr Henry Bell (Senior Lecturer in Performance, University of the West of Scotland).

At the event UWS students worked with Act for Change (Ghana), Cena IV Shakespeare Cia (Brazil) and BraveSpaces Creative India (India) to share practice and approaches to decentering and decolonising Shakespeare. The resulting work was the subject of an article in The Conversation.

This micro-conference will gather the project partners together to deliver the next stage in the project. A mixture of practice and scholarly responses, we will focus on critically exploring decentered Shakespeare practice, pedagogy and scholarship the conference will engage with the following themes:

• Approaches to decentered collaborative practice

• Shakespeare and decentered site

• Approaches to decentered Shakespeare scholarship

Panel

Prof Bridget Escolme (QMUL)

Dr. Abdul Karim Hakib (University of Ghana)

Prof Christopher Thurman (Wits University, SA)

UWS Academic Leads:

Dr Henry Bell, Senior Lecturer in Performance

Dr Stephen Collins, Reader in Performance