Part archival record and part performance, digital video can register the theatrical contingency in a manipulable medium (with a rich network of video cross-references) that creates discursive knowledge about Shakespeare as site-specific performed events. Archiving the otherwise ephemeral history of performance is an important goal, but even more important are the new research questions such archives enable. Digital video amplifies the energy that make Shakespeare so compelling in our time.
With the dramatically increased availability of primary research material through digital video archives, the field may eventually move toward a mode of inquiry that inherently considers performances in comparative contexts. As the field matures, Shakespeare in performance may no longer require such qualifying adjectives as Asian, European, African, or even global. Digital video archive can make Shakespeare studies an integral part of public scholarship and the future of humanities as envisioned by Julie Ellison, Kathleen Woodward, and others—a new form of ‘making knowledge about, for, and with diverse communities’, yielding artifacts of public and intellectual value which include low-cost and high-impact digital videos. That is the task of the performance archive.
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Hundreds of thousands of Shakespeare-related videos including promotional clips for stage productions—buoyed by a tag cloud—‘live’ on the English- and Japanese-language portals of YouTube and other video-sharing and social networking sites around the world. Some of these may be transient, but digital video is a large part of Shakespeare’s presence in contemporary world cultures and reconceptualising the idea of liveness and archive. As digital screens become ‘the default interfaces for media access’ and data mining, the public can express themselves audiovisually on these sites while shaping the resulting archive.
These days one can attend a virtual performance of Hamlet or a staged reading of Twelfth Night on Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world allowing users to interact online with each other through their personalised avatars. Meanwhile, online quest and role-play games such as Arden beckon players to explore first hand Shakespeare’s medieval world or Renaissance Italy. In Mabinogi Hamlet, a three-dimensional medieval-themed MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-play game), one assumes the dual roles of the gamer and the player in the theatrical sense. There is a storyline following the narrative of the Shakespearean tragedy, but the participants are free to reinvent the wheel as they converse with a character named Marlowe who holds the script of Hamlet, watch an animation of the ramparts scene, join Hamlet and Horatio on a stealth mission to follow Claudius, and eventually dress up to become Hamlet—letter in hand and joined by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on a mysterious ship. It takes an average player approximately four hours to finish the quest. Interestingly, the game ends with a curtain call. All the characters and gamers appear on stage to receive applause. Built around sleek visual effects, games such as these are part performance archive and part performance event, combining rehearsed, programmed events and improvisational, contingent actions on and off stage.
As well, many theatre companies have experimented with interactive contents and online videos—live or recorded—to engage existing, future, on-site, and off-site audiences before, during and after the productions. Some projects bring globally circulating texts closer to a local audience. Other projects focus on bringing local, site-specific performances to a global audience. As the National Theatre Live entered its second season on October 14, 2010, nearly 200,000 people saw London productions broadcast in high definition to 320 screens in cinemas and theatres in 22 countries. The video broadcast made stage performances more affordable and increased the production value of the plays for both on-site (privileged) and off-site (mass) audiences. The presence of Shakespeare in contemporary culture owes a great deal to these hybrid forms of entertainment.
These are signs that the age of Global Shakespeare 2.0—worldwide performances in digital forms—has arrived. It is an age when archival meanings are co-determined by the locations and digital afterlives of performances. It is an age when Shakespeare has achieved a new level of membership in world literature and on the Internet via diverse channels of exchange, diffusion, and dissemination. The term ‘global Shakespeare 2.0’ is used here to describe a stage in performance theory and practice enabled by digital forms and tools. It is distinct from the hype of what has been called the Web 2.0 in official PR—brave new, ‘democratised’ world enabled by the Internet’s video and social networking functionalities.
Global Shakespeare, a phenomenon that began to take shape in the playwright’s lifetime, is part of the transnational cultural flow of an ever expanding body of texts that circulate beyond the Elizabethan English culture of origin in various forms of English, in intralingual translation, and in intersemiotic transformation. The last category pertains to a broad range of interpretive possibilities, including political readings, theatrical representations of a play, and digital manipulations and archiving—speech into image, verbal signs to nonverbal signs, and subtitling.
Defined by remarkable internal divisions and incongruities, Shakespearean performances in our times often embrace self-referentiality and inter-media citational strategies. Adaptations refer to one another in addition to the Shakespearean pretext. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a good example. It brings both the melodramatic and tragic elements of the play into stark relief against modern media fiction and history. Cheah Chee Kong’s film Chicken Rice War (Singapore, 2000) parodies Hollywood rhetoric and global teen culture. During the audition for a high school production of Romeo and Juliet in the film, a young lady challenges her classmate, an aspiring actor: ‘What makes you think that you can play Romeo? You don’t have the looks, and you can’t even speak properly. … Do you think you look like Leonardo [DiCaprio]?’ The two films, along with their undefined Shakespearean sources, engage in the kind of responsive, polyglot, inter-media conversation that makes reading across cultures so compelling today.
The present time is defined by the rise of global Shakespeare 2.0 as new artistic, digital, and intellectual paradigms that are moving beyond the celebratory vision of literary universalism. If the first phase of the study of global Shakespeare was defined by the ‘ideological investments in the conventions of authenticity’ or resonances of the Globe, global Shakespeare 2.0 is shaped by multilocal perspectives enabled by online tools and Shakespeare’s ‘vernacular applicability’ along shifting textual and performative axes. More notable interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays are emerging across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and many performances are being archived, read closely, and used as case studies in the classroom. Directors such as Ninagawa Yukio, Sulayman Al-Bassam, Ong Keng Sen, and Peter Brook reached diverse audiences through new strategies to bring together different cultural contexts and genres even as global Shakespeare continues to be defined by its alterity.
However, it is useful to bear in mind that, encompassing not only non-Anglophone interpretations but also the global circulation of performances in any language, global Shakespeare is not always a rosy undertaking. Rendering Macbeth in Zulu or touring an Arab adaptation of Richard III to London would entail a very different level of cultural prestige than translating Korean playwright Yi Kangbaek into English. Wars, censorship, and political ideologies can suppress or encourage particular approaches to selected Shakespearean plays or genres, and the digital enterprise is built upon a volatile relationship among content creators (rights holders), platform providers, and funding agencies, as evidenced by Viacom’s law suits against YouTube and numerous other cases.
Though there have been profound changes in the realm of text through what N. Katherine Hayles calls ‘media translation’, the digital revolution has had an even more profound effect on how we can use images, text, moving image and sound.
The field of Shakespeare in performance stands to gain from archival stability and the repertoire of embodied cultural history. A performance video archive with vetted contents and open-access platform can become both the archive and the repertoire. Distinct from analogue media such as photography and film, digital video—as a non-linear, non-sequential medium—can support instant access to any sequence in a performance, as well as the means to re-order and annotate sequences, and to bring them into meaningful conjunction with other videos, texts and image collections. A global archive of Shakespeare as a performed event can play a crucial role both in Shakespeare studies by enabling an ever-wider range of interpretive possibilities that activate important aspects of the plays through videos that connect live performances to the concepts of rehearsal and re-play.
While one may be limited to digitised texts in a project such as The Dickinson Electronic Archive (http://www.emilydickinson.org/), Shakespeare offers the richest material for negotiating the transition from textual paradigms or the expanded book model to a truly performance-based mode of understanding cultural production and reception. In part this is because Shakespeare is so widely studied, taught and performed throughout the world, but it is also because it has now become possible to bring together a coherent collection of video recordings of complete productions of sufficient depth to create a densely interconnected video environment in which one can move freely from one performance or sequence to others based on the particulars of the performances themselves rather than solely based on their relation to Shakespeare’s text, or to the needs of a text-driven understanding of their significance. A video-centered, rather than a text-centered Shakespeare archive has the potential to transform key scholarly and pedagogical practices in the humanities, and to give performance-based study the precision of reference and the depth of access to the basic documentary materials of the field long taken for granted in the domain of textual studies. Of course digital video can never replace live performance, but it can, especially in a globally interconnected online environment, do many things that the performances it records cannot in themselves do. Digitised performances can form new relationships with the local and global, contemporary and even ancient histories of which they are a part.
Wider knowledge of contemporary refashionings of Shakespeare in performance are not only valuable in themselves, but can lead us back to Shakespeare’s plays with new insight and new paths for interpretation. Works such as Ong Keng Sen's transnational and pan-Asian productions (Search: Hamlet, Lear, Desdemona), Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It with a strong Japanese motif, and Tim Supple's multilingual Midsummer Night's Dream with an all-Indian and Shri Lankan cast, are generating extraordinary artistic and intellectual energy by recasting gender, racial and social identities.
Performances are best studied and taught not as isolated instances of artistic expression but as parts of a dynamic network of forms and meanings. Having instant, unpredictable, cross-genre access to videos presages a new relationship between the embodied performance and spectator. Further, the openness and scope of this network of materials, valuable in itself, is also an essential first step in any attempt at identifying the most artistically innovative and intellectually interesting productions from each region, and formulating interpretive and historical questions on the basis of an adequate survey of the field.
As theatre has formed alliances with other media including video, the study of Shakespeare and performance stands to gain from taking advantage of video’s capacity to help decouple text and performance in ideological formations and re-join them as open sites where negotiations of meanings take place.
EXCERPTED FROM --
Alexander C. Y. Huang, "Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive." Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011), pp. 38-51.
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Author
Alexander Huang is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, General Editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, and Research Affiliate in Literature at MIT.
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