Caliban and Shylock Speak - Decolonizing Shakespeare

Decolonizing Shakespeare is an international experiment in correlating theatrical performance, cultural work and civic discourse, in ooperation with David Peimer (South-African born playwright, director and Professor of Performance studies at Edge Hill University, Liverpool), Robert Gordon (Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths University of London, Director of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing) and Zeno Ackermann, Professor of British Cultural Studies at Würzburg University.

Caliban and Shylock Speak – Decolonizing Shakespeare is an international and interdisciplinary project that brings together theatrical performance, civic discourse and academic scholarship. Combining Shakespearean dialogue, South African street theatre and performances at various European sites, the project sets out to evolve, assess and theorize ways of opening up ongoing historical discourses of otherness. In doing so, it deliberates pressing questions of identity and citizenship, especially within the multidirectional frameworks provided by privileged literary and cultural legacies ('Shakespeare'), on the one hand, and site-specific socio-political and mnemonic discourses, on the other. The project is based on the production of a new playtext — written by theatre scholar, playwright and director David Peimer — which uses and adapts text from The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest in order to foreground and collocate two fascinating Shakespearean 'outsiders': on the one hand Shylock, who has often been constructed as a 'quintessentially' Jewish figure, on the other hand Caliban, the "savage and deformed slave" who has had a long career both as a distorted image of colonized peoples and as a key object of anti-colonialist appropriations or transformations. The play is built on the supposition that in the context of contemporary global migration both figures can be restaged according to a politically productive paradigm of decolonization.

The project will test this proposition both practically and academically, combining a performance tour that covers key memory sites from Europe to Africa with an intellectual frame that reflects on the individual performances from the perspectives of memory studies, performance studies and 'Global Shakespeare'. The material outputs will include an edition of the play-text with pictures from the performance tour and a scholarly volume of essays that will emerge from an international conference.