‘I was your slave’: Revisioning kinship in Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Shared Spaces ◽  
And Performance ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

This article offers a critical reading of Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. By drawing on early modern race studies and Marshall Sahlin’s notion of ‘mutuality of being’, the article discusses Morrison’s lyrical prose as well as Traoré’s songs and performance to show how they merge and amplify one another in Sellars’ meditative staging to jointly rearticulate early modern notions of race, kinship and family embedded in Othello. By questioning what lies dormant, unseen and unheard in the Shakespearean tragedy, Desdemona supplements it with what Imtiaz Habib has termed ‘imprints of the invisible’ and invites its readers and audiences to ponder the onset of European colonialism, the slave trade, colour-based racism and their global aftermath, positing theatre as a metaphor for other civic, shared spaces where honest conversations about race, gender and class inequalities can open up a path to healing and reconciliation.

Channelling the dead: A conversation on Desdemona with Tina Benko

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
York City ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Character Building

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.

Singing back to the Bard: A conversation on Desdemona with Rokia Traoré

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Artistic Director

Rokia Traoré is a Malian singer, guitarist and composer, known worldwide for her artistic syncretism and political activism. Her distinctive style blends elements of traditional Malian music with blues, folk and rock to address contemporary geopolitical and humanitarian issues. She is the artistic director of Fondation Passerelle, a non-profit organization she founded in 2006 to support young African singers and musicians by offering them high-quality professional training and work opportunities in the music industry. In this interview, she discusses her experience as songwriter and performer in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, sharing some intimate memories and elaborating freely on the role of performers and the importance of focused listening in live stage productions.

A View from the Middle: Teaching Nineteenth-Century African American Theatre and Performance

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-108
Author(s):  
Michelle Granshaw ◽  
Douglas A. Jones Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
And Performance

A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927. By David Krasner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; pp. 370. $35 cloth; Stories of Freedom in Black New York. By Shane White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002; pp. 260. $27.95 cloth.

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-125
Author(s):  
Lisa B. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
The Family ◽  
And Performance

In “Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature,” Sandra Richards argues that scholars largely ignore the African-American contribution to theatre and performance. She suspects that most critics regard “drama as a disreputable member of the family of literature” (65). Even African Americanists neglect dramatic literature; indeed, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature includes only a scant number of plays. Both David Krasner and Shane White effectively redress this oversight and shift the focus from African-American literature to blacks on stage in their recent monographs about early nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century drama.

Highlights of African American Theatre and Performance

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-18
Author(s):  
Alexander Craft Renée ◽  
F. DeFrantz Thomas ◽  
A. Perkins Kathy ◽  
L. Richards Sandra
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
And Performance

scholarly journals Dehierarchizing Space: Performer-Audience Collaborations in Two Portuguese Performances of Shakespeare

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (30) ◽  
pp. 27-41
Author(s):  
Francesca Rayner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
Performance Context ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

This article addresses the key role of performance space in mediating between cultural locations. It discusses two Portuguese performances of Shakespeare where audiences were invited to become part of the performance and the ways in which this dehierarchization of the performance space framed a cross-cultural encounter between a globalized text and a localized performance context. In Teatro Oficina’s 2012 King Lear, both audience and performers sat around a large table in a production which reflected upon questions of individual and collective responsibility in Shakespearean tragedy and in the wider political sphere. In the middle of this performance space hung a large cube onto which the translated text was projected, setting up a spatial tension between text and performance that also foregrounded the translocation of the Shakespearean text to a Portuguese performance context. In Tiago Rodrigues’ 2013 By Heart, ten members of the audience were invited onstage to learn Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 “by heart and not by brain.”1 In doing so, Rodrigues emphasized the cultural embeddedness of Shakespearean texts in a wider European cultural context and operated a subtle shift from texts to performance as a privileged repository for the cultural memory of Shakespeare. The article explores how these spatial shifts signaled the possibility of enabling cross-cultural identifications with Shakespeare through performance.

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