Visiting Artists
Globe Series
“The Globalization of Shakespeare”
One of the most significant Shakespearian developments in the past decade has been the great expansion of productions seen internationally, outside the countries of their origins. Unlike the film industry, the trend to globalized theatre cannot rely on an existing method of distribution. The theatrical version is dependent on spectator travel, the growing willingness of festivals to sponsor visiting productions, and a general cultural interest in the foreign, all of which touch on larger issues of globalization, tourism, and language. Drawing on productions from Europe and Asia, this lecture will treat some of the major complications of globalized Shakespeare performance. Reference will also to be made to Kennedy’s own production of As You Like It in Beijing in 2005.
Dennis Kennedy is Samuel Beckett Professor of Drama in Trinity College Dublin. His books include Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre, Plays by Harley Granville Barker, Looking at Shakespeare: a visual history of twentieth-century performance, and Foreign Shakespeare. He is the general editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (2 vols., 2003), and was an advisory editor for The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. He is currently writing a book on the condition of the spectator in theatre, sport and television, another on Shakespeare and the director, and editing (with Yong Li Lan) a second volume of Foreign Shakespeare on performance in Asia. His essays have appeared in numerous books and journals and he has lectured widely on theatre and performance subjects around the world. In the past few years he gave major addresses in Berlin, Prague, St. Petersburg, Brisbane, Helsinki, the Huntington Library, and at the universities of Bristol, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Kyoto, Lisbon, Michigan, and Notre Dame.
He has held distinguished visiting professorships at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, the National University of Singapore, the Salzburg Seminar, McMaster University, the University of Victoria, and the University of Wisconsin, and was Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Karachi in Pakistan. He has twice been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA, twice won the Freedley Award for theatre history, received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh, the Berkeley Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, and was elected to the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea.
His own plays have been performed in New York, London, and many other places, and he has frequently worked as a dramaturg and director in professional theatres. In 2005 he directed Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Chinese Central Academy of Drama in Beijing and in 2006 Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Dublin.