Zoom Theatre and Global

Utopian Shakespeare
by Sonia Massai
sonia.massai@kcl.ac.uk

Intersections in Shakespeare
4th Biannual Conference
Asian Shakespeare Association (5-7 Nov 2020)
PART I

Global Shakespeare
in Pre-Lockdown
Performance
 Sonia Massai
‘Networks: Researching Global Shakespeare’

in Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince (eds),

The Arden Research Handbook of
Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance
(forthcoming in March 2021)
o The Rise of ‘Global Shakespeare
Studies’ (late 1990s):
The Taxonomic Instinct
o The Rise of ‘Global Shakespeare
Studies’ (late 1990s):
The Taxonomic Instinct

o ‘Global Shakespeare Studies’

Comes of Age (2000-2010):
The Theoretical Instinct
o The Rise of ‘Global Shakespeare
Studies’ (late 1990s):
The Taxonomic Instinct

o ‘Global Shakespeare Studies’

Comes of Age (2000-2010):
The Theoretical Instinct
Cultural Field (Pierre Bourdieu)
o The Rise of ‘Global Shakespeare
Studies’ (late 1990s):
The Taxonomic Instinct

o ‘Global Shakespeare Studies’

Comes of Age (2000-2010):
The Theoretical Instinct
Cultural Field (Pierre Bourdieu)
Network (David Weinberger)
o The Rise of ‘Global Shakespeare
Studies’ (late 1990s):
The Taxonomic Instinct

o ‘Global Shakespeare Studies’

Comes of Age (2000-2010):
The Theoretical Instinct
Cultural Field (Pierre Bourdieu)
Network (David Weinberger)

o The Consolidation of ‘Global

Shakespeare Studies’ (2010-19):
The Political Instinct
Global Shakespeare as Network
 From
Global Shakespeare as Network

To
Networked Shakespeare (“Zoom Theatre”)
There is no theatre apart from its
apparatus … The history of theatre is not
merely the history of the creation and
adaptation of representational tools –
bank verse and prose, the grave trap,
electric lighting – but the ongoing
reinvention of theatre as a technological
apparatus, in which new instruments and
new affordances for familiar instruments
are constantly discovered and deployed
as theatre.

William B. Worthen, Shakespeare, Technicity,

Theatre (CUP, 2020), p. 10, p. 22.
[Understanding] theatre as technicity
shifts our attention from the uses of
technology in the theatre – as though
those instruments operated within some
larger, non-technological framework, as
though theatrical performance used
technologies but remained distinct from
them – to the instruments, objects,
construction, and practices of
performance as a “technical system”.

William B. Worthen, Shakespeare, Technicity,

Theatre (CUP, 2020), p. 28
PART II

Zoom
Shakespeare
Mic Technique is a big part of the
journey the actors go on over the two
and a half days of rehearsal. The closer
they are to the screen the quieter they
have to speak – the further back they
are, they have to really enunciate all
their consonants because reverb and
room tone start to become issues
(which can be good when we want to
give it a more public/outdoor or
declamatory feel).

Robert Myles (in conversation, 19 September 2020)

You have to give performances theatrical
energy when you are in a tiled cascade and
your screen may make you the size of a
postage stamp, which means the level of
expression must be bigger and more active.
By contrast, when you occupy the screen
alone for soliloquy, it’s like film acting.

Robert Myles (in conversation, 19 September 2020)

We don’t do any editing to the live-
stream whatsoever – everything is done
by the actors in camera, operating it from
their end. … We notify the actors which
direction to turn in, live on the night,
based on how the presentation looks on
YouTube, with seconds to spare before
the action is required.

Robert Myles (in conversation, 19 September 2020)

Anne as a character had to be a fighter.
Her verbal confrontation with Richard is
a fight, she gives absolutely as good as
she gets. … Lucy and I discussed this idea
and worked for the first time on
her leading the camera, rather than
being led by the camera. It was a subtle
distinction, but in their movements back
and forth, she gets a lead on the camera
that has to “catch up”. She was then
completely free to take control of her
space and her situation.
Robert Myles (in conversation, 19 September 2020)
We did strive for colour-conscious casting
for this production (and others in the run),
absolutely. After his turn as the character
in Henry VI Part III we wanted to give
Ashley the opportunity to reprise the role
and complete the journey, and we knew
that we wanted to make sure we had Black
actors in positions of authority within the
play. Too often in Shakespeare, Black and
Global Majority actors are cast in servant
or low status roles that are, subconsciously
perhaps, bound up in the Victorians’ use of
Shakespeare to aggrandise Empire.
Instead, we wanted to show that Black
actors and Black Characters could rule.

Robert Myles (in conversation, 19 September

2020)
PART III
“Negative Convergence”
(from Henry Jenkins’s formulation of
“digital convergence” as “the flow of
content across multiple media
platforms, … when users, creators
and distributors participate in
transmedia activities”)

Kitamura Sae, ‘The Curious Incident of

Shakespeare Fans in NTLive: Public Screenings
and Fan Culture in Japan’, in Pascale
Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E.
Osborne, eds, Shakespeare & The ‘Live’
Theatre Broadcast Experience (London:
Bloomsbury, 2018), 177.
We suggest that people’s normality
judgments take into account both
descriptive considerations (e.g., the
statistical notion of the average) and
more prescriptive considerations (e.g.,
what is morally ideal). Thus, when
people are trying to determine whether a
given thing is normal or abnormal, they
will take into account both information
about whether it is statistically average
and information about whether it is
prescriptively ideal.

Bear, A., & Knobe, J. ‘Normality: Part descriptive,

part prescriptive’, in Cognition (2016),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. cognition.2016.10.024
Our great crisis, the coronavirus, forces
us to watch plays alone … instead of
drawing us into proximity with
strangers. … And so, in a very real way,
each of us is on her own. The work of
playwriting, acting, and theatrical
production today might be to
reintroduce us to one another, one at a
time.
Vinson Cunningham, ‘How are
Audiences Adapting to the Age of
Virtual Theatre?’, The New Yorker, 5
October 2020
Now face to face with Davis, moments
of gently heightened language took me
out of, then put me right back into, the
action of the play – and made me feel
its artifice while being convinced of its
deeper reality, all at once.

Vinson Cunningham, ‘How are

Audiences Adapting to the Age of
Virtual Theatre?’, The New Yorker, 5
October 2020
I don’t think the performers, Equity or
ourselves as producers would have
thought it was feasible for actors to
perform regularly from their homes and
yet the situation we have found
ourselves in has exposed some
significant benefits to access, work life
balance, and the environment in doing
so.

Lucy Askew (Creation Theatre) and Zoe

Seaton (Big Telly), in Digital Theatre
Transformation – A Case Study & Digital
Took Kit
(https://www.creationtheatre.co.uk/abo
ut/digital-theatre-transformation/)
Whereas the 2019 (19 July – 15 August)
production had reached 3,368 individual
audience members with summer visitors
from 11 countries, in 2020 (11 April – 10
May) it reached 1,200 households in 27
countries, with a sizeable proportion of
its audience participating from the USA,
Ireland and Canada.

Digital Theatre Transformation – A Case

Study & Digital Took Kit
(https://www.creationtheatre.co.uk/abo
ut/digital-theatre-transformation/)
‘Non-places begin with unrootedness.’

Marc Augè, Non-Places: Introduction to an

Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), p.9.
‘Non-places begin with unrootedness.’

Marc Augè, Non-Places: Introduction to an

Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), p.9.

‘The legacy of Euro-American modernity

conditions the continuing aspiration to acquire a
supposedly authentic, natural and stable
“rooted” identity.’

Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double

Consciousness (1993), p. 30