Brandon Shaw
Biographic Data
| ID | 3981925 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brandon Shaw |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brandon |
| FAMILY NAME | Shaw |
| SIGNATURE | SHAW B |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 2 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 28 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque: Absence, Touch, and Religious Residues
In Act II, Scene V, of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice , Bassanio, a Venetian lord, prepares to host a masque, but the trade winds change unexpectedly and Bassanio’s ship sets sail that very evening, cancelling the masked ball. Although this masqued scene is never realized, written, or staged, its mention is enough reason to interrogate its possibility. Through a Derridean decentering of presence, bringing together the extensive literature o…
Shakespeare Ballets in Germany: From Jean-Georges Noverre to John Neumeier
William Shakespeare has inspired more ballets than any other writer in the history of dance. This chapter deals with Shakespeare’s reception on the German ballet stage from the eighteenth century to the present day. During this period, choreographers continuously developed the movement vocabulary of dance and found new ways to transpose Shakespeare’s works into ballets. One of the most innovative creators of literature ballets in the twentieth ce…
Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare: Balanchine, Holm, and Robbins
Shakespeare’s plays have served as inspiration for a score of Broadway musicals. These musicals have contributed to the development of the musical theater libretto from a loose collection of sketches to an integrated “book musical” that equally values text, music, design, directing, and dance. While many are familiar with some of the most popular hits from those shows—including “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” from the Cole Porter’s musical, Kiss Me, …
[They Dance]: Collaborative Authorship and Dance in Macbeth
This chapter argues that in early modern England, dance scenes were among the most radically collaborative components of a play’s text, prone to complicating questions of authorship and attribution. Arguing that dances rarely circulated between contemporaneous plays without significant alteration, it also takes a long view of collaboration, noting the successive alterations to the play made by Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and William Davenant, …
“The Wisdom of Your Feet”: Dance and Rhetoric on the Shakespearean Stage
This chapter examines the coincidence of moments of dance with particularly rhetorical language in Shakespeare’s plays, including Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It , and Romeo and Juliet . It offers a brief cultural background on the conflicting attitudes toward dance and rhetoric located in, among others, their power to persuade through patterned movement and language, a power amplified through an experience of embodied cognition on the mul…
“The Heaven’s True Figure” or an “Introit to All Kind of Lewdness”?: Competing Conceptions of Dancing in Shakespeare’s England
There are no extant English dancing manuals from the Shakespearean period, but there are abundant printed and manuscript sources that mention dancing. However, these sources convey mixed messages. The theoretical conceptions articulated by dance’s opponents and proponents in the “debate on dance” do not always correspond well with the evidence of customary practices. While early modern religious treatises decry dancing for encouraging illicit sex…
We Are All Made: The Socioeconomics of The Two Noble Kinsmen’s Anti-Masque Morris Dance
John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (ca. 1613–1614) includes a version of the anti-masque morris dance from Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn , part of the nuptial celebration for King James’s daughter. When transferred to the stage, the dance became a commodity with multivalent appeal. If the court anti-masque parodically appropriated the folk dance, then as the stage reappropriated the dance,…
“Thou Art Translated”: Affinity, Emulation, and Translation in George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This chapter argues that the translation of Shakespeare’s works into dance functions as a rite of passage for twentieth-century choreographers, one that offers the opportunity for dance makers to place themselves in the “great man” genealogy inherent in the Western literary canon and to influence, even reshape, that canon through an alternative lexicon. Focusing specifically on George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , this chapter argues t…
Dancing Her Death: Dada Masilo’s The Bitter End of Rosemary (2011) as a South African Contemporary Rethinking of Hamlet’s Ophelia
This chapter offers new readings for Shakespeare and dance through a transmodern reading of The Bitter End of Rosemary (2011) and an understanding of the rise of South African choreographer Dada Masilo. A contextualisation of post-apartheid dance (based on Friedman, 2012) and the postcolonial revisions of Shakespearian texts (after Loomba and Orkin, 1998) in South Africa precedes insights into the nascent body of work by Masilo, one of the key wo…
Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception: Shakespeare Adaptations in a Black Atlantic Context
This chapter explores meaning-making and reception in a range of Shakespeare adaptations within the black Atlantic context. Inspired by the authors’ own collaboration incorporating African Caribbean folkloric dance into Shakespeare’s Pericles: Prince of Tyre , the chapter examines historical and contemporary adaptations, revealing multiple ways in which African and African diaspora themes and cultural forms signify within Shakespeare’s colonial c…
Measure in Everything: Adapting Hamlet to the Contemporary Dance Stage
This chapter investigates the concept of “legibility” in two contemporary dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet : Kenneth MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles (1988, Dance Advance) and Stephen Mills’s Hamlet (2000, Ballet Austin). While Mills’s full-length narrative follows the chronology of events as dramatized in Hamlet , MacMillan’s postmodern piece eschews narrative coherence. Both nonetheless find ample scope for challenging the demand for intell…
“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”: Synetic Theater and Physical Shakespeare
This chapter considers work created by the Synetic Theater Company in the Washington, DC, area. Since its inception in 2002, Synetic has produced an award-winning series of “physical theater.” Under the co-direction of Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, both of whom were trained professionally in the Republic of Georgia, Synetic has created over a dozen “wordless” Shakespeare performances that have received numerous awards. They recently remounted th…
“The Revellers Are Entering”: Shakespeare and Masquing Practice in Tudor and Stuart England
This chapter addresses Shakespeare’s incorporation of the court masque genre into his plays for the public stage, from the perspective of a dance historian. During Shakespeare’s active work with the company of players, he embraced the Tudor form and the continental mascarade , followed by new developments under the Stuart king, James I, to include the anti-masque. By analyzing the chronological changes in masque and dance entries, it becomes clea…
Introduction to Part II: Shakespeare as Dance
This introduction to Part II of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance —“Shakespeare as Dance”—considers the translation of Shakespeare’s plays and poems into dance and the effects that movement has on the meaning of those works. In doing so, it charts the tension between language, movement, and “legitimacy” in danced versions of Shakespeare and asks whether the term “adaptation” is adequate in describing dance works that may be said to cap…
“Hildings and Harlots”: Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet
On February 9, 1965, the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s full-length dance adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a score by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev took place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This chapter uses the figures of the three harlots in MacMillan’s ballet—characters that do not appear in Shakespeare’s play—to explore the real, practical, and pragmatic business of adaptation. The harlots, typically repr…
Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night
Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain verbal references to specific dances. Knowledge of early modern dance conventions can be of tremendous value in reading (and staging) these plays: “decoding” the dance references unveils layers of subtext that are relevant to an understanding of thematic issues and of the psychological makeup of characters, and it suggests visual ways in which scenes can be staged. This chapter examines dance references in Much…
Dancing with the Archive: Early Dance for Shakespearean Adaptation
Historically the appearance of twelve men dressed as satyrs, who are introduced as “having danced before the king” in The Winter’s Tale , have assisted with dating Shakespeare’s play in the same year as Ben Jonson’s masque, Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611). Stone No More , a devised performance created by the author for the Exeter Northcott Theatre, United Kingdom, took this moment of intertextuality as its inspiration, and, working with what is k…
Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies: The Case of Romeo
Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particula…
“When the Play Is Done, You Shall Have a Jig or Dance of All Treads”: Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage
Anyone familiar with the works of Shakespeare will know that some of his comedies end in a dance, and anyone visiting Shakespeare’s Globe today is likely to witness the company return to the stage after the play to perform a dance. By surveying and appraising the evidence relating to dance as a conclusion to the theatrical event—whether featured at the close of the drama, or as a dance following the play, or as part of a comic musical afterpiece,…
Incorporating the Text: John Farmanesh-Bocca’s Pericles Redux and Crystal Pite’s The Tempest Replica
This chapter considers two works, Pericles Redux and The Tempest Replica , created by Not Man Apart (NMA) Physical Theatre Ensemble and Kidd Pivot, respectively. It argues that the cross-over genres of physical theater and dance theater are well suited to Shakespeare adaptations, and that these two works succeed because, in keeping with Shakespeare’s own dramatic art, they mingle comic and tragic, classical and vernacular, and “pivot” among diffe…
Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance
This chapter explores the intersection of modernist aesthetics and danced adaptations of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. It situates the discussion in a wide spectrum of danced interpretations, but focuses primarily on the attenuated narratives and economic form of three one-act danced versions of the tragedies: Robert Helpmann’s Hamlet (1942), José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949, based on Othello ), and Limón and Pauline Koner’s Barren Sc…
Introduction to Part I: Shakespeare and Dance
Dancing was ubiquitous in early modern England and Europe, and the literature of this period inevitably reflects this practice. This introduction to Part I of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance —“Shakespeare and Dance”—traces the development of dance traditions during the period of Shakespeare’s life. Despite the scarcity of choreographic source material from dancers and teachers working in England, information relating to dance can be …
Hamlet, The Ballet: Examining a Choreographic Process
Through the themes of literacy and polysemanticism, materiality and signification, this chapter investigates the creative and rehearsal processes of the choreography for David Nixon’s ballet Hamlet (2008) for Northern Ballet, United Kingdom. The chapter investigates the planning process, research and development sessions, choreographic approaches, dramaturgical guidance, and scenographic choices in this work. Questions are raised about the semiot…
“Therefore Ha’ Done with Words”: Shakespeare and Innovative British Ballets
The chapter examines three ballets inspired by Shakespeare, created for the British Royal Ballet companies. Kenneth MacMillan’s Images of Love (1964) and The Prince of the Pagodas (1989) provide context for analysis of David Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite (1999). The structural decisions, stylistic choices, and how these adaptations were received are evaluated. Particular attention is paid to the response to plot and to character, while more all…
Haunted by Hamlet: Devising William Forsythe’s Sider
Choreographer William Forsythe did not set out to engage with Hamlet when creating the 2011 work Sider . Instead, Hamlet ’s textual rhythms and dramaturgy were first found to be in uncanny resonance with the ensemble’s choreographic research, then elaborated into a robust, multifaceted, yet obscure dramaturgical underpinning. Drawing on the author’s experience as dramaturg to The Forsythe Company, this article discusses Sider ’s devising process,…
Phantom Limbs and the Weight of Grief in Sasha Waltz's noBody
How can dance-a performing art often expressing emotions through virtuosic bodies-portray its antipode: absence, the imperceptible, and death? Beginning with Martha Graham's 1930 solo choreography Lamentation , this essay will consider how a dancer's partnership with an elastic fabric can awaken spectators to a corporeal, kinetic sense of grief. Perceiving the life of the dancer within the fabric and this dynamic duet between the animate and inan…
Phantom Limbs and the Weight of Grief in Sasha Waltz's noBody
How can dance-a performing art often expressing emotions through virtuosic bodies-portray its antipode: absence, the imperceptible, and death? Beginning with Martha Graham's 1930 solo choreography Lamentation , this essay will consider how a dancer's partnership with an elastic fabric can awaken spectators to a corporeal, kinetic sense of grief. Perceiving the life of the dancer within the fabric and this dynamic duet between the animate and inan…
Effacing Rebellion and Righting the Slanted: Declassifying the Archive of MacMillan's (1965) and Shakespeare's (1597) Romeo and Juliet s
Archival evidence of Shakespeare's and Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet s evince patriarchal efforts to efface female rebellion. As Juliet, Lynn Seymour declassifies ballet through recalcitrant stillness and off-balance choreography. Patriarchal institutions enlisted Margot Fonteyn's classifying instinct to efface these balletic transgressions from the archive utilizing strategies corresponding to early modern textual editing practices
The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque: Absence, Touch, and Religious Residues
In Act II, Scene V, of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice , Bassanio, a Venetian lord, prepares to host a masque, but the trade winds change unexpectedly and Bassanio’s ship sets sail that very evening, cancelling the masked ball. Although this masqued scene is never realized, written, or staged, its mention is enough reason to interrogate its possibility. Through a Derridean decentering of presence, bringing together the extensive literature o…
Shakespeare Ballets in Germany: From Jean-Georges Noverre to John Neumeier
William Shakespeare has inspired more ballets than any other writer in the history of dance. This chapter deals with Shakespeare’s reception on the German ballet stage from the eighteenth century to the present day. During this period, choreographers continuously developed the movement vocabulary of dance and found new ways to transpose Shakespeare’s works into ballets. One of the most innovative creators of literature ballets in the twentieth ce…
Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare: Balanchine, Holm, and Robbins
Shakespeare’s plays have served as inspiration for a score of Broadway musicals. These musicals have contributed to the development of the musical theater libretto from a loose collection of sketches to an integrated “book musical” that equally values text, music, design, directing, and dance. While many are familiar with some of the most popular hits from those shows—including “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” from the Cole Porter’s musical, Kiss Me, …
[They Dance]: Collaborative Authorship and Dance in Macbeth
This chapter argues that in early modern England, dance scenes were among the most radically collaborative components of a play’s text, prone to complicating questions of authorship and attribution. Arguing that dances rarely circulated between contemporaneous plays without significant alteration, it also takes a long view of collaboration, noting the successive alterations to the play made by Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and William Davenant, …
“The Wisdom of Your Feet”: Dance and Rhetoric on the Shakespearean Stage
This chapter examines the coincidence of moments of dance with particularly rhetorical language in Shakespeare’s plays, including Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It , and Romeo and Juliet . It offers a brief cultural background on the conflicting attitudes toward dance and rhetoric located in, among others, their power to persuade through patterned movement and language, a power amplified through an experience of embodied cognition on the mul…
“The Heaven’s True Figure” or an “Introit to All Kind of Lewdness”?: Competing Conceptions of Dancing in Shakespeare’s England
There are no extant English dancing manuals from the Shakespearean period, but there are abundant printed and manuscript sources that mention dancing. However, these sources convey mixed messages. The theoretical conceptions articulated by dance’s opponents and proponents in the “debate on dance” do not always correspond well with the evidence of customary practices. While early modern religious treatises decry dancing for encouraging illicit sex…
We Are All Made: The Socioeconomics of The Two Noble Kinsmen’s Anti-Masque Morris Dance
John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (ca. 1613–1614) includes a version of the anti-masque morris dance from Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn , part of the nuptial celebration for King James’s daughter. When transferred to the stage, the dance became a commodity with multivalent appeal. If the court anti-masque parodically appropriated the folk dance, then as the stage reappropriated the dance,…
“Thou Art Translated”: Affinity, Emulation, and Translation in George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This chapter argues that the translation of Shakespeare’s works into dance functions as a rite of passage for twentieth-century choreographers, one that offers the opportunity for dance makers to place themselves in the “great man” genealogy inherent in the Western literary canon and to influence, even reshape, that canon through an alternative lexicon. Focusing specifically on George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , this chapter argues t…
Dancing Her Death: Dada Masilo’s The Bitter End of Rosemary (2011) as a South African Contemporary Rethinking of Hamlet’s Ophelia
This chapter offers new readings for Shakespeare and dance through a transmodern reading of The Bitter End of Rosemary (2011) and an understanding of the rise of South African choreographer Dada Masilo. A contextualisation of post-apartheid dance (based on Friedman, 2012) and the postcolonial revisions of Shakespearian texts (after Loomba and Orkin, 1998) in South Africa precedes insights into the nascent body of work by Masilo, one of the key wo…
Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception: Shakespeare Adaptations in a Black Atlantic Context
This chapter explores meaning-making and reception in a range of Shakespeare adaptations within the black Atlantic context. Inspired by the authors’ own collaboration incorporating African Caribbean folkloric dance into Shakespeare’s Pericles: Prince of Tyre , the chapter examines historical and contemporary adaptations, revealing multiple ways in which African and African diaspora themes and cultural forms signify within Shakespeare’s colonial c…
Measure in Everything: Adapting Hamlet to the Contemporary Dance Stage
This chapter investigates the concept of “legibility” in two contemporary dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet : Kenneth MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles (1988, Dance Advance) and Stephen Mills’s Hamlet (2000, Ballet Austin). While Mills’s full-length narrative follows the chronology of events as dramatized in Hamlet , MacMillan’s postmodern piece eschews narrative coherence. Both nonetheless find ample scope for challenging the demand for intell…
“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”: Synetic Theater and Physical Shakespeare
This chapter considers work created by the Synetic Theater Company in the Washington, DC, area. Since its inception in 2002, Synetic has produced an award-winning series of “physical theater.” Under the co-direction of Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, both of whom were trained professionally in the Republic of Georgia, Synetic has created over a dozen “wordless” Shakespeare performances that have received numerous awards. They recently remounted th…
“The Revellers Are Entering”: Shakespeare and Masquing Practice in Tudor and Stuart England
This chapter addresses Shakespeare’s incorporation of the court masque genre into his plays for the public stage, from the perspective of a dance historian. During Shakespeare’s active work with the company of players, he embraced the Tudor form and the continental mascarade , followed by new developments under the Stuart king, James I, to include the anti-masque. By analyzing the chronological changes in masque and dance entries, it becomes clea…
Introduction to Part II: Shakespeare as Dance
This introduction to Part II of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance —“Shakespeare as Dance”—considers the translation of Shakespeare’s plays and poems into dance and the effects that movement has on the meaning of those works. In doing so, it charts the tension between language, movement, and “legitimacy” in danced versions of Shakespeare and asks whether the term “adaptation” is adequate in describing dance works that may be said to cap…
“Hildings and Harlots”: Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet
On February 9, 1965, the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s full-length dance adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a score by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev took place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This chapter uses the figures of the three harlots in MacMillan’s ballet—characters that do not appear in Shakespeare’s play—to explore the real, practical, and pragmatic business of adaptation. The harlots, typically repr…
Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night
Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain verbal references to specific dances. Knowledge of early modern dance conventions can be of tremendous value in reading (and staging) these plays: “decoding” the dance references unveils layers of subtext that are relevant to an understanding of thematic issues and of the psychological makeup of characters, and it suggests visual ways in which scenes can be staged. This chapter examines dance references in Much…
Dancing with the Archive: Early Dance for Shakespearean Adaptation
Historically the appearance of twelve men dressed as satyrs, who are introduced as “having danced before the king” in The Winter’s Tale , have assisted with dating Shakespeare’s play in the same year as Ben Jonson’s masque, Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611). Stone No More , a devised performance created by the author for the Exeter Northcott Theatre, United Kingdom, took this moment of intertextuality as its inspiration, and, working with what is k…
Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies: The Case of Romeo
Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particula…
“When the Play Is Done, You Shall Have a Jig or Dance of All Treads”: Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage
Anyone familiar with the works of Shakespeare will know that some of his comedies end in a dance, and anyone visiting Shakespeare’s Globe today is likely to witness the company return to the stage after the play to perform a dance. By surveying and appraising the evidence relating to dance as a conclusion to the theatrical event—whether featured at the close of the drama, or as a dance following the play, or as part of a comic musical afterpiece,…
Incorporating the Text: John Farmanesh-Bocca’s Pericles Redux and Crystal Pite’s The Tempest Replica
This chapter considers two works, Pericles Redux and The Tempest Replica , created by Not Man Apart (NMA) Physical Theatre Ensemble and Kidd Pivot, respectively. It argues that the cross-over genres of physical theater and dance theater are well suited to Shakespeare adaptations, and that these two works succeed because, in keeping with Shakespeare’s own dramatic art, they mingle comic and tragic, classical and vernacular, and “pivot” among diffe…
Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance
This chapter explores the intersection of modernist aesthetics and danced adaptations of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. It situates the discussion in a wide spectrum of danced interpretations, but focuses primarily on the attenuated narratives and economic form of three one-act danced versions of the tragedies: Robert Helpmann’s Hamlet (1942), José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949, based on Othello ), and Limón and Pauline Koner’s Barren Sc…
Introduction to Part I: Shakespeare and Dance
Dancing was ubiquitous in early modern England and Europe, and the literature of this period inevitably reflects this practice. This introduction to Part I of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance —“Shakespeare and Dance”—traces the development of dance traditions during the period of Shakespeare’s life. Despite the scarcity of choreographic source material from dancers and teachers working in England, information relating to dance can be …
Hamlet, The Ballet: Examining a Choreographic Process
Through the themes of literacy and polysemanticism, materiality and signification, this chapter investigates the creative and rehearsal processes of the choreography for David Nixon’s ballet Hamlet (2008) for Northern Ballet, United Kingdom. The chapter investigates the planning process, research and development sessions, choreographic approaches, dramaturgical guidance, and scenographic choices in this work. Questions are raised about the semiot…
Art (29 works) · Dance (27 works) · Literature (26 works) · History (20 works) · Theater, Performance, and Music History (20 works) · Visual arts (19 works) · Aesthetics (17 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (14 works) · Diversity and Impact of Dance (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works)