The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice

David Ruiter

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350140370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on Shakespeare and issues of social justice and arts activism by an international team of leading scholars, directors, arts activists, and educators. Across four sections it explores the relevance and responsibility of art to the real world and to the significant teaching and learning, performance and practice, theory and economies that not only expand the discussion of literature and theatre, but also open the gates of engagement between the life of the mind and lived experience. The collection draws from noted scholars, writers and practitioners from around the globe to assert the power of art to question, disrupt and re-invigorate both the ties that bind and the barriers that divide us. A series of interviews with theatre practitioners and scholars opens the volume, establishing an initial portfolio of areas for research, exploration, and change. In Section 2 'The Practice of Shakespeare and Social Justice' contributors examine Shakespeare's place and possibilities in intervening in issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Section 3 'The Performance of Shakespeare and Social Justice' traces Shakespeare and social justice in multiple global contexts: engaging productions grounded in the politics of Mexico, India, South Africa, China and aspects of Asian politics broadly, this section illuminates the burgeoning field of global production while keeping as a priority the political structures that make advocacy and resistance possible. The last section on 'Economies of Shakespeare' describes socio-economic and community issues that come to light in Shakespeare, and their potential to catalyze ongoing discussion and change in respect to wealth, distribution, equity and humanity. An annotated bibliography provides further guidance to those researching the subject.

PART ONE

The Shakespeare and social justice interviews

CHAPTER 1.1

Deconstructing social hierarchies

ERIN COULEHAN

As I write this, nestled in my home office in one of the oldest neighbourhoods in El Paso, Texas, social hierarchies are being broken down all around me. President Trump was impeached, migrants in Ciudad Juárez are facing dangerous conditions and a general sense of unrest has lingered for the past three years. Many things are changing.

When I think about breaking down social hierarchies, I think about groups of students I worked with at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in the summers of 2018 and 2019. I was a teaching assistant for a study abroad course on Shakespeare that travelled to London to study literature and theatre, always through a social justice lens. For many of these students (I was once one of them), this seemed like a fantasy drawn from one of the fancy texts on the syllabus. There was no way a girl in El Paso, one of the poorest metropolitan areas in the United States, was going to go to Shakespeare’s Globe to study, write and pursue a scholarly life. It somehow seems beyond reality, in much the same way that the same girl who once studied abroad is now assisting in editing this collection.

But we make it happen!

These students exemplify breaking down social hierarchies because they do it every single day. Eighty per cent of UTEP students are Latinx, over 50 per cent are first-generation college students, and many come from households that earn less than $20,000 a year. Households. For many students getting through college is a massive undertaking that the entire family faces together, with talent, courage and resilience. There is a great deal of responsibility and sacrifice and things like studying abroad often don’t fit into the framework.

In 2018, one of our students booked a very tedious flight to London in a moment of panic that many of our students face when the realization of their travel hits. She had never travelled on a plane before and was overwhelmed by the possibilities suddenly available to her. She then felt humiliated that she had failed at such a basic task, booking a plane ticket. How, she thought, would she fare in London?

We were able to rebook her flight and even arranged for other students to book the same itinerary – instant allies!

By going to London, this young woman shattered every boundary she thought was limiting her. Her race, her size, her financial status, being a woman. She excelled in her coursework, but most importantly she learned how to live. She texted me selfies with Lady Gaga from the front row at a concert, emailed about the best way to get to Paris from London for a weekend trip with her ‘flatmates’ (her term!), and she came back with a new-found confidence in herself. For the first time, she told me, she was proud to take up space, and felt that this first experience empowered her to do it again and again.

This is what Shakespeare and a commitment to social justice does: changes things.

What follows is a collection of five interviews conducted by David Ruiter with professionals who are helping to break down social hierarchies within their own spaces. We see the ways that Shakespeare and social justice works on theatrical and political stages, from Chris Anthony of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, who notes how Shakespeare has helped to reshape the city following devastating social uproar, and Erica Whyman from the Royal Shakespeare Company, who has made important and controversial casting decisions that have led to increased inclusivity and acclaim. In other contexts – cultural, racial, sexual, educational, etc. – Arthur L. Little Jr. discusses social hierarchies in terms of the black male heterosexual body in America and Shakespeare; Ewan Fernie considers how relationships between British cities and Shakespeare’s humanism encourage a greater sense of personhood; and Farah Karim-Cooper, from Shakespeare’s Globe, takes up the cause of activating audiences and students to seek out higher levels of representation.

These conversations are rich with the stuff that makes our academic, political and poetic hearts beat, allowing us to engage in and help generate something – a cause, a fight, a humanity, certainly a dialogue – greater than ourselves. In reading these interviews, I hope that more conversations are sparked. With your students. With your families. With yourselves. I think you’ll find that you arrive at more questions than answers; that is part of the magic that we’re able to achieve through the momentum of continued engagement – and, of course, Shakespeare.

CHRIS ANTHONY

Chris Anthony is an assistant professor of Performance at The Theatre School at DePaul University, Chicago. She has worked to find common ground between art and community, using human relations dialogue to enrich artistic practice and artmaking in the service of community development. She began working with the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles’ Will Power to Youth programme in 1995 and has been Programme Director since 2001. Will Power to Youth has been highly praised for its effectiveness in community arts and has won numerous commendations, including the prestigious ‘Coming Up Taller’ award. Anthony has directed performances at the St. Louis Black Rep, Cornerstone Theatre and Native Voices and her programmes and performances consistently work towards empowering youth, veterans and other vulnerable populations.

In this interview, Chris Anthony discusses how the perceived hierarchies of access to Shakespeare shifted in urban youth and continue to evolve our understanding of literature and the human experience.

***

David Ruiter (DR): Why don’t we talk for just a second about why 1993 is important for Will Power to Youth?

Chris Anthony (CA): 1993 is an important year for Will Power to Youth because it was the culmination of a year of planning that was prompted by the civil unrest in Los Angeles in April of 1992. So at the end of April 1992, the Rodney King riots, as they’re popularly known, broke out following the acquittal. Following the Rodney King riots and the devastation primarily in south LA – but actually across all Los Angeles; it flared up in south LA, but spread across the breadth of the city – there was a lot of tension amongst civic leadership, private foundations and from a lot of artists in Los Angeles, a lot of pooling of resources and rallying of people together to help. And so Will Power to Youth was created as a partnership between the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, which was then Shakespeare Festival LA, and The National Conference of Community and Justice, which was then the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) in LA. So there was one person, Dani Bedau, who had been a teenager in the NCCJ programme and trained as an actor at CalArts and was an intern at Shakespeare Festival, but had the vision to bring the world of inter-community dialogue and theatre together. So Will Power to Youth really was developed after conversations that the Shakespeare Center had, folks at NCCJ had, with teenagers and asking them what they wanted. And their answers generally boiled down to they wanted teachers who genuinely cared about them and what they were teaching, and they wanted jobs. So Will Power to Youth from the very beginning has been a jobs programme. Young people, essentially between the ages of fourteen to twenty-one, and now it’s fifteen to twenty-one, have been paid to work on a Shakespeare play in the summer.

DR: The community wanted youth summer employment through this?

CA: For the kids it was about having a job in the summer. I think the city leadership, the community development department, was aware of the ways this job could help kids prepare for careers in the future. I think that was not necessarily the students’ entry point but it is something the programme had to show evidence of in order to receive certain support.

DR: Tell us a little about how successful the Will Power to Youth programme was at the beginning, and how successful it’s been over time. Particularly, who were the young people who were there at the beginning? Where did they come from? Has that remained the same? Is the geographic location of the student population the same for the most part? And, in the last fifteen years, the downtown area of Los Angeles has also changed. So can you walk us through from when you were there at the beginning and what has happened over time in terms of who’s involved in the community?

CA: Because the programme was sponsored by the city and was always connected to the city’s Summer Youth Employment programme, there was always a political connection. There was always a stipulation from the money that paid the youth who we could hire and where they came from. And that geographic centre shifted from year to year depending on which city council person sponsored it, or where the city’s priority was.

When I first started, we were in Watts, we were in Jordan Downs (Nickerson Gardens), we were at the King Drew Medical Center, that’s where we performed. We have been in other parts like Fairfax and Olympic – sort of that Miracle Mile area – but it has always been designed to serve children living at or below the poverty level. So we have always served that population and no matter where it was. But the geographic centres, and therefore the ethnic centres, have shifted. So being in Los Angeles, this has always been a Hispanic-serving programme; like a university would be designated, we would be [Hispanic-serving] just because we’re in LA. But the composition of that community has shifted a lot.

In the very earliest years, there was a mandate to serve low-income students, and they were always Black or Latinx. There was always a Black presence earlier, and then in the mid-to- late ’90s we spent more time in Hollywood, and there were more services with the GLASS houses (the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services), so we had more trans youth, we had more street youth. More kids who had been kicked out of their homes for being gay, or were involved with various substances and were in foster homes or homeless shelters. Then the funding shifted again and we got the building in downtown Los Angeles. And so when we got our own physical space, and not just a church basement each year, the funding also shifted to serve more of that geographic area.

In the year 2000, when we acquired the space, [the newcomer centre was at] Belmont High School, so we served a lot of very fresh immigrants from Central America and Mexico. That population was very well represented there, and so we had a lot of English-language learners. The building also sits in Historic Filipinotown, with great community partners. But we also served, similarly, the north end; a mile north of us is Chinatown. So we also had a larger Chinese and Chinese immigrant population in Will Power to Youth, and there was a big Korean community just west of us. Right now, the Latinx immigrant population has shifted into Koreatown because a lot of downtown has gentrified so much that a lot of families have been sort of pushed over further west. A lot of kids in the early 2000s lived in Pico Union, which is the neighbourhood the Staples Center is in. Before the Staples Center was built, there was a lot of dense housing and a lot of people were pushed out of that area for the building and development of the area.

DR: So we’re talking about immigration and therefore new national identities, relocation from outside of the country into LA or from one part of LA into another part of LA. We’re talking about a pretty wide spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds. We’re talking about socio-economic status from the bottom quarter; we’re also talking about sexual identity transitions through issues that have also caused homelessness. All of this comes through the door of one place, and I don’t think most people would find that place to be about Shakespeare if they were to have guessed – in fact, it seems really incredible to think that, after all the things that you just mentioned stemming from racial and other sorts of violence, like with the Rodney King riots. All the people that you’re serving in various parts of the city and yet these kids are coming to find employment, care and some opportunity within the doors of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. What is the relationship? How does Shakespeare connect to all of this?

CA: It’s crazy, right? I think that there are many levels to the answer. Historically, Shakespeare has been used as a goal to aspire to. That if you can get good at something, then you can understand Shakespeare. Or if you are educated or cultured, then you can understand Shakespeare: that there’s a process that you have to go through. A rigorous, mind-altering process that will somehow grant you entry into some sort of enlightened state by virtue of reading Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was really good at writing about people and because he understood so much about humanity, our students are walking through the door with a wealth of knowledge of Shakespeare – but they just don’t know the language.

Actually, tonight we’re going to have a performance of Will Power to Youth, and we’re doing a production of Twelfth Night. The young woman who plays Fabian is the third of her siblings to do the programme. Her older sister first did the programme in 2007, and she played Lady Montague. She had been sent away from her family in the Philippines. She had been sent away for some sort of teenage shenanigans. They sent her to the US, and when she first got here she wasn’t allowed to speak Tagalog, her native language, at home because they wanted her to speak English. She was really having a hard time, and she wrote a piece with other members of the community for Lady Montague to speak about what would happen to her if anything happened to Romeo. She said, ‘If anything happened to Romeo, my heart could not function.’ And to have a play that’s so widely known as this cultural touchstone is one thing, but to have a young person who actually understands banishment? Who actually knows what it feels like to be sent away, and what that separation would mean? I think most professors I’ve ever had have no experience with that. I don’t know anyone else better to teach me about banishment than this young woman who was separated from everyone she knew, and just sent away.

ERICA WHYMAN

Erica Whyman is the Deputy Artistic Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Under Whyman, the RSC has been at the forefront of cutting-edge performances that challenge audiences to think about theatre and society in nuanced and intersectional ways. She has set an example as a leader who is committed to equality, diversity and ensuring access to theatre and to Shakespeare. In 2016, she directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for the Nation, incorporating fourteen amateur theatre groups into the professional production alongside 600 children, performing all over the UK, and in 2018, she directed the much-lauded production of Romeo and Juliet at the RSC, the Barbican and on a national tour. She was one of the first fellows of the Clore Leadership Programme and in the 2012 New Year’s Honours List she was awarded an OBE for Services to Theatre in the UK. In November 2016, she won the Peter Brook Empty Space Special Achievement award. She is the Chair of Theatre 503 and Deputy Chair of the Coventry City of Culture Trust.

In this interview, Erica Whyman explores shifting hierarchies of race and gender in plays like Romeo and Juliet and the effect these shifts have on young audiences.

***

David Ruiter (DR): You recently said that Shakespeare leads need to be played by a wider range than we’ve seen. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Erica Whyman (EW): I think quite a lot of change is happening, but I am mindful that [in] the RSC’s and Shakespeare’s history in the UK, there have been moments where we’ve seen intriguing new thoughts on who can play leads. And it hasn’t turned into consistent changes in how we think about it. And the reason I think it matters so much is theatre is, of course, a platform where we’re reflecting society. Where we have an opportunity to paint a picture both of the society as it really is, as opposed to, perhaps, narrow versions that we receive via other media. But also, where we can stretch an audience – shift the way they might imagine society and [in] an imaginative space, where that’s not threatening but exciting and opens up horizons and possibilities. And I feel that about the theatre, but, I guess with Shakespeare in the UK, there is such a complex set of rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. This is real life: Shakespeare and social justice as a field of play
• Part One: The Shakespeare and Social Justice Interviews
• Part Two: The Practice of Shakespeare and Social Justice
• Part Three: The Performance of Shakespeare and Social Justice
• Part Four: The Economies of Shakespeare and Social Justice
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint