How hard was it for you or perhaps many of your high school friends to get into Shakespeare?
The language, of course, is the first barrier to entry. High school kids in particular are often not ready to invest the time in getting to know Elizabethan English in order to get to the story. But there are plenty of other challenges in a Shakespeare play that can make it inaccessible or unrelatable to a modern audience.
Sure, many would argue that Shakespeare's themes are "universal,": love, unrequited love, love triangles, jealousy, greed, etc. But it's the way in which these themes are rendered that can either cause an audience to "get it" and love it, or dismiss it.
There are also many "scenes" that take place off stage, and a character rushes into the scene to update us on what's been going on. For instance, one of my greatest struggles is Lady Macbeth's decline. She disappears for quite a while and comes back demented, obsessing over the blood on her hands, when scenes before she was manipulative and fueled by greed.
There are many more scenes that may be unrelatable to a modern audience with modern tastes. There are scenes that we now want and need to see displayed before us in order to continue suspending disbelief.
One of the key elements about Theatrum Elysium's production that I think addresses the issue of relatability quite well is the dancing. The dancing fills in the gaps and provides us with the much needed bits of character development that a modern audience needs in order to believe the character, to feel their happiness and their sorrow.
In ANW's Cymbeline, Imogen and Posthumous are separated from each other so quickly that it's hard to me to understand that there was a connection before Posthumous gets banished. What Theatrum Elysium did beautifully was add a dance right before they're separated where Imogen and Posthumous are being forcibly removed from each other, and you can see their struggle to get back to one another - danced, of course, to a beautifully evocative song.
Throughout Theatrum's production, dances appear at integral moments that help us feel what the characters are feeling. I could write an entire post for each one of the dances, but probably the most important dance is the war dance.
Right after our battle scene, in which Posthumous fights like a champion, we enter a scene in which Posthumous is surrounded by dead bodies: the ones he killed and the ones of his compatriots. The song playing in this war site is beautifully chosen, as it combines two extremely evocative songs: This Bitter Earth and On the Nature of Daylight. Each blindfolded, nameless body rises in jolted movements, their limbs unable to extend in the graceful way they did when living. After heartbreaking twitches and struggles, each body lets go of a white handkerchief and falls to the grown again, lying still.
Posthumous throws himself to the ground and tries to cover himself with dirt. This singular gesture, had it just been acted, would've potentially been hyperbolical and overly dramatic. But in the context of the song, of the dying bodies, this gesture of regretting his survival and wanting to be buried with the horrors of war moves every emotion I could be clinging to. It makes his despair in the subsequent scenes much more tangible, as I've lived through the horrors with him through the dance.
This beautiful way of rendering emotions that are not written in Shakespeare's folios was unexpected and so moving that I regret seeing this production only twice.
The language, of course, is the first barrier to entry. High school kids in particular are often not ready to invest the time in getting to know Elizabethan English in order to get to the story. But there are plenty of other challenges in a Shakespeare play that can make it inaccessible or unrelatable to a modern audience.
Sure, many would argue that Shakespeare's themes are "universal,": love, unrequited love, love triangles, jealousy, greed, etc. But it's the way in which these themes are rendered that can either cause an audience to "get it" and love it, or dismiss it.
There are also many "scenes" that take place off stage, and a character rushes into the scene to update us on what's been going on. For instance, one of my greatest struggles is Lady Macbeth's decline. She disappears for quite a while and comes back demented, obsessing over the blood on her hands, when scenes before she was manipulative and fueled by greed.
There are many more scenes that may be unrelatable to a modern audience with modern tastes. There are scenes that we now want and need to see displayed before us in order to continue suspending disbelief.
One of the key elements about Theatrum Elysium's production that I think addresses the issue of relatability quite well is the dancing. The dancing fills in the gaps and provides us with the much needed bits of character development that a modern audience needs in order to believe the character, to feel their happiness and their sorrow.
In ANW's Cymbeline, Imogen and Posthumous are separated from each other so quickly that it's hard to me to understand that there was a connection before Posthumous gets banished. What Theatrum Elysium did beautifully was add a dance right before they're separated where Imogen and Posthumous are being forcibly removed from each other, and you can see their struggle to get back to one another - danced, of course, to a beautifully evocative song.
Throughout Theatrum's production, dances appear at integral moments that help us feel what the characters are feeling. I could write an entire post for each one of the dances, but probably the most important dance is the war dance.
Right after our battle scene, in which Posthumous fights like a champion, we enter a scene in which Posthumous is surrounded by dead bodies: the ones he killed and the ones of his compatriots. The song playing in this war site is beautifully chosen, as it combines two extremely evocative songs: This Bitter Earth and On the Nature of Daylight. Each blindfolded, nameless body rises in jolted movements, their limbs unable to extend in the graceful way they did when living. After heartbreaking twitches and struggles, each body lets go of a white handkerchief and falls to the grown again, lying still.
Posthumous throws himself to the ground and tries to cover himself with dirt. This singular gesture, had it just been acted, would've potentially been hyperbolical and overly dramatic. But in the context of the song, of the dying bodies, this gesture of regretting his survival and wanting to be buried with the horrors of war moves every emotion I could be clinging to. It makes his despair in the subsequent scenes much more tangible, as I've lived through the horrors with him through the dance.
This beautiful way of rendering emotions that are not written in Shakespeare's folios was unexpected and so moving that I regret seeing this production only twice.
