English seminar: Big Skies and Specific Sites: Shakespeare’s Environments in the North American West
22 March
Woolley S226 and Zoom
Gretchen Minton, ‘Big Skies and Specific Sites: Shakespeare’s Environments in the North American West’
In this lecture dramaturg, director, and script adaptor Gretchen Minton discusses recent outdoor productions by Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and Montana InSite Theatre. An analysis of diverse site-specific outdoor locations reveals the unexpected ways that material and built environments comingle as part of theatrical performance. Whether performed at grain silos or willow groves, in bird blinds or next to sculptures by artists such as Ai Weiwei, these productions embrace the complex histories of their placeness as an integral part of engaging with Shakespeare. Even when staged under notoriously ‘big’ skies, Shakespeare performances that are rooted in local, partially enclosed micro-spaces offer exciting possibilities for expanding the ecological dimensions of the plays.
Gretchen Minton is Professor of English at Montana State University. She has edited several early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. She is the co-founder of Montana InSite Theatre, which is dedicated to site-specific performances that use classical texts to address environmental issues. Projects for this company include Timon of Anaconda, Shakespeare’s Walking Story, and Walking the Water Way. Minton also serves as dramaturg and script adaptor for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, which participated in the 2021-22 international project called “Cymbeline in the Anthropocene.” Currently she is a Fulbright Scholar at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, where she is working on an ecologically inflected adaptation of Twelfth Night.
Contact: Liam Semler (liam.semler@sydney.edu.au)
Seminar overview for S1 2023
| 22 March
Woolley Room S226 and Zoom |
Gretchen Minton (Montana State University, and Fulbright Scholar, James Cook University), ‘Big Skies and Specific Sites: Shakespeare’s Environments in the North American West’
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| 5 April
Zoom only |
Harilaos Stecopolous (University of Iowa), ‘Reconsidering Transnational Literary Studies: US Literature in the Diplomatic Frame’
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| 19 April
Woolley Room S226 and Zoom |
Doug Battersby (Marie Curie Global Fellow, Stanford and Bristol), ‘Cardiac Realism: The Affective Life of the Modern Novel’
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| 3 May
Woolley Room S226 and Zoom |
Nienke Boer (University of Sydney), ‘The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World’
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| 17 May
Woolley Room S226 and Zoom |
Frances Di Lauro (University of Sydney). Title to be advised. |
