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Aboriginal Australians use ochre in varied cultural practices. It is found in the earliest to most recent archaeological sites and geographically across the wide-ranging geological and climatic contexts of the continent. Ochre’s importance in Aboriginal societies, coupled with its availability across Australia and its long-term durability, has led to a ubiquitous archaeological presence with considerable potential to study past cultural landscapes and intergroup interactions, including long-distance trade and exchange. Concentrating on scientific sourcing analyses, this article highlights the benefits of archaeopigment research, defining key terms (ochre, provenience, and provenance) and the technicalities of sourcing studies before discussing theoretical frameworks used in interpretations of ochre distribution patterns. The article argues that as we move away from novel studies on ethnographically well-known source locations into applied research, exceptional Australian records are well placed to investigate territoriality, mobility, intergroup and human–landscape interactions, and to explore the catalysts driving cultural diversity.

Completed in 1966, Liz White’s Othello is the first and only Shakespeare film directed by a black woman, as well as the first cinematic adaptation of a Shakespeare play to feature an all-black cast and crew. When production began in 1962, White was intent on using her landmark adaptation to assert a place for women within the male-dominated black nationalist movements of the 1960s. By focusing on the (mis)treatment of women in Othello, White links their struggle—or lack thereof—to the double displacement of black women within the burgeoning civil rights movement. Particularly in this context, it seems counter-intuitive that White would draw upon conventions from one of the most conservative cinematic genres—the American film musical—to generate an alternative set of signifying practices for articulating civil rights claims and for chronicling the historical process whereby women become the vanishing mediators of social ‘progress’…

This chapter considers the impact of ‘global Shakespeare’ on performance traditions associated with mainstream Shakespeare on the English stage with particular focus on productions which put Shakespeare in conversation with non-English theatrical conventions in order to unsettle the distinction between ‘English Shakespeare’ and ‘Foreign Shakespeare’. The main focus of the chapter is the work of a London-based theatre company, ‘Two Gents Productions’, formed by a German-born director from South Africa and two Zimbabwean actors, and the evolution of their ‘township theatre’ approach to Shakespearea from their launch production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona south London (Ovalhouse) in 2008 to their contribution to the Globe to Globe Festival in 2012. The uniquely intercultural, playful quality of their Shakespearean productions shows that intercultural performance need not involve cultural looting or an unequal exchange between participating cultures. It justifies an optimistic outlook for intercultural performance in increasingly globalized theatrical (and Shakespearean) geographies.

This chapter examines British director Leon Rubin’s 2003 The Adventures of Pericles at Ontario’s Stratford Festival and analyses its overtly intercultural scenography. The reading is grounded in an analysis of the festival’s vision of itself as a tourist destination that offers a special ‘Stratford experience’. It is argued that the festival’s identity is at once very local and international and the implications of this bifurcated identity are considered through a series of interrelated questions. What is the nature of Rubin’s borrowings from Asian performance traditions, such as Balinese trance rituals? How does the festival portray such borrowings in its publicity material? What kinds of ideas do reviewers circulate about these productions? If, in the early years of the millennium, the festival looked to a British director to purvey ‘Asian’ spectacle to a relatively international audience, what role did Canada, as a nation state, play in sustaining Stratford’s tourist ‘experience’?

The recent performance history of Macbeth illustrates two tendencies discernible in contemporary Shakespeare performance more widely: the strong, empathic engagement characteristic of theatrical intimacy in the Aristotelian vein and the vast, distancing sweep of epic as theorized by Bertolt Brecht and, later, Walter Benjamin. By considering productions by Punchdrunk, Rift, John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg, Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford, and Grzegorz Jarzyna, this chapter argues that epic theatre as proposed by Brecht and Benjamin is a marked feature of immersive productions, which combine the impression of intimacy with the distancing effect of the epic. Using Elinor Fuchs’s notion of landscape theatre, it concludes that in contemporary apolitical epic theatre, intimacy can be achieved outside Aristotelian catharsis or character and even beyond the notion of humanity.

This chapter discusses three methodological concerns about studying global Shakespeare—those touring and intercultural performances often thought to play a geopolitical role in cultural diplomacy. First, the postnational space for global arts is shaped by mutual influence and fluid cultural locations rather than by traditional notions of the nation state. It is therefore no longer useful to consider a production within one national context. Second, global Shakespeare as a field of study reflects the anxiety about cultural particularity and universality. Identifying the dynamics behind the production and reception of global Shakespeare will help us confront archival silences in the record of cultural globalization; what has been redacted, eliminated, or suppressed. Third, global citations of Shakespeare—whether in performances or by politicians—demonstrate a spectral quality. The spectre of global Shakespeare is a product of the politically articulated promise and perils of cultural difference.

What remains of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival through the globeplayer.tv seems to have yoked neo-Victorian ideals of the 1851 Great Exhibition to twenty-first-century social media marketing tools. The globeplayer.tv helps to spread the Globe brand internationally but at a price. This chapter argues that the festival she experienced was much more than a product and that individual productions within it reclaimed, as well as wrote back to, imperial attitudes and the project of civilizing the natives through Shakespeare. Linking analysis to the reassessment of history as experience and digital marketing as storytelling, the chapter argues that performance criticism has nowhere to go but back to its origins in theatre history, chronicling the interaction and political implications of specific performances. The author traces how how she travelled through the performances to help create the archive of the festival and likens her role to ‘Chorus to this history’.

This essay considers three movements in twenty-first-century Shakespearean performance in light of Philip Auslander’s influential study Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999): (1) the live broadcasting of theatre productions; (2) the increasingly popular genre of immersive theatre as spectator sport; and (3) the body of practice emerging from, and centring on, the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. It considers the ways in which each of these movements constructs ‘liveness’, paying particular attention to the implications of these constructions for Shakespearean performance. The first movement is examined through the lens of the National Theatre Live broadcast of Nicholas Hytner’s Othello, whose ‘liveness’ involves an interplay of filmic and theatrical registers; the second, through a discussion of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More; and the third, through the modern practice of finding ‘liveness’ in game-like theatre techniques and in the responsiveness of the actor at Shakespeare’s Globe.

How do scholars and practitioners know what audiences think about non-traditionally cast productions of Shakespeare? Non-traditional casting—the practice of casting actors of colour in roles originally imagined as white characters performed by white actors—is a common phenomenon on British and American stages, especially in contemporary productions of classical plays. Nonetheless, very little research has been conducted on the effects of perceptions of race in/as performance on classical stages. This chapter asks a series of theoretical and methodological questions about the intersection of reception theory, the theatre archive, and race in/as performance. Beginning with an overview of reception studies for Shakespearean theatrical productions, it then examines an unusual audience reception archive—audience surveys conducted by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—to analyse reactions to non-traditional casting of Romeo and Juliet. Finally it considers contemporary race studies and offers some thoughts about how to move forward with Shakespearean reception studies.

One of the culturally dominant means through which time is conceptualized as space, and vice versa, jet lag has increasingly become a metaphor we live by. It has particular resonances for Shakespearean performance, a phenomenon that is, by definition, perpetually out of time. Taking as a point of departure Brian Cox’s 1991 account of his experience of the National Theatre’s touring productions of King Lear and Richard III, this chapter aligns the predicament of the jet -lagged traveller, the off-form actor, and the jet-lagged, off-form travelling actor to argue that their mutual predicament offers an under-explored frame of reference for performance in general and for Shakespeare in performance in particular. It examines how mechanisms of synchrony (or entrainment) shape the actor’s work in performance and with the audience. It also examines the implications of theatrical good and bad timing, and the sometimes unexpected consequences of time getting out of joint.

Whilst the cultural materialist scholarship of the 1980s asserted that Shakespeare can never be our contemporary, actors, directors, and voice practitioners have insisted with equal assurance and political passion that Shakespeare always has something to say to the contemporary moment. This chapter uses three recent productions of Othello as case studies to consider the artistic and ideological work that rendering Shakespeare ‘our contemporary’ allows his plays to do in order to current and historical constructions of social class and race. Even as the chapter continues the cultural materialist project of naming the theatrical and cultural strategies of appropriation used by Shakespeare production, it also seeks to explore the theatrical and cultural work Shakespeare does to the contemporary. It suggests that performing Shakespeare is always a dialogue between the discourses, theatrical conventions, and political concerns of past and present.

One of the most significant Shakespearian developments in the past twenty years is the great expansion of productions in languages other than English, especially from Asia. Some of these productions have been seen internationally. Unlike the film industry, globalized theatre cannot rely on an existing method of distribution; rather, it is dependent on spectator travel, the willingness of festivals to sponsor visiting productions, and a general cultural interest in the foreign, all of which involve larger issues of globalization, tourism, language, and interculturalism. The pinnacle of globalized Shakespeare was reached in 2012 with the Globe to Globe Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, when thirty-seven plays were performed by companies from around the world. Drawing on productions from Europe and Asia, this chapter treats the major complications of globalized Shakespeare performance, with some attention to Kennedy’s own production of As You Like It in Beijing in 2005 in Chinese.

This chapter explores the differing impact of the transvestite on stage and film. Its primary focus is on Sven Gade’s 1920 silent film Hamlet, starring the Danish film star Asta Nielsen as the prince, and Julie Taymor’s 2010 film The Tempest, with Helen Mirren reimagining Prospero and Prospera. The nine decades between the two films measure the course of several generations of technical and social progress. Further, their exemplary use of cross-dressing and gender-bending serve yet again to show larger historical crossings between Shakespeare’s generation and our own. Gade’s Hamlet serves as a defining historical moment for cross-dressing and gender-bending in filmed Shakespeare. Taymor’s Tempest provides a similar occasion for a contemporary audience—but with two important differences. Because Gade’s Hamlet is silent, visuals necessarily dominate text, whereas in Taymor’s Tempest visuals and text take on an integral balance and mutual reinforcement.

Exploring the polarized opinions of the general public, scholars, and theatre professionals within China, and between China and Britain, on the Chinese Shakespeare Great General Kouliulan (Coriolanus)—which combines spoken drama with rock ’n’ roll—this chapter revisits many questions that have been raised in the debate over intercultural theatre. Why are theatre practitioners interested in producing an intercultural piece? How does it happen and what do artists do? Who benefits from doing intercultural work, and for whom is it intended? Is ‘process’ necessarily more important than ‘outcome’, and is there too much emphasis on ‘we’ and ‘others’ in the debate rather than on the created work at the end of the process? Lin Zhaohua’s Coriolanus serves as the case study in the chapter but other modern spoken drama productions and traditional song-dance theatre adaptations are also mentioned to offer readers a broader understanding of Shakespeare on the Chinese stage.