BSA 2025: Seminars

The seminars running at BSA 2025 are listed below.

1. “Original Practices”: Pasts, Presents, and Futures (Dr Benjamin Blyth, University
of Calgary)

This seminar considers the pasts, presents, and futures of “Original Practices” in Shakespeare performance and research. What began in the late 1990s as an experiment to “discover and recreate Shakespeare’s company’s working practices” (Shakespeare’s Globe) has achieved global reach, with scholars and practitioners around the world experimenting with a range of historical performance techniques in a variety of reconstructed spaces. In this seminar, we will interrogate the core aspects and assumptions behind the term “Original Practices”, and reflect on what we have learned from almost thirty years of OP. We will ask — what does it mean to make “original” work in the present moment? What limitations or changes have emerged to OP over time? What does this work look like beyond Shakespeare? Or beyond the Globe? And what role, if any, might historical practices play in the future of Shakespeare on stage, in research, in the classroom, and in print? This seminar welcomes papers that engage with any aspect of early modern performance practices including (but not limited to) material culture, training and skills, rehearsal, casting, editing and texts, audiences, technologies, and playing spaces — and encourages contributions that consider diversification, decolonization, and inclusion in contemporary OP research.

2. Coordinated casting in Shakespeare: matchmaking and pragmatism (Dr Jakub Boguszak, University of Southampton)

How often does one casting choice depend on another? Notwithstanding the popular commonplace, directors cannot always approach casting simply with the aim of finding the best actor for each part (Herrera, 2015). On many occasions the casting process involves coordinating individual casting decisions, either to address specific practical contingencies, or to do some creative matchmaking, where pairs of actors get to develop contrasts or assert symmetries between their characters simply by being cast together. Casting coordination is not just a matter of looking for chemistry between the romantic leads; finding the right pair of actors for Stephano and Trinculo, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, or King John and the Bastard can be just as rewarding.

This seminar aims to explore the traditions and innovations of coordinated casting. It asks how this practice can interpret the text, but it also seeks to do justice to casting decisions that are guided less by theoretical principles and more by exigencies and opportunities unique to each production. This focus on casting coordination offers a useful corrective to our discipline, which tends to foreground the careers of individual celebrities and which has made great strides over the last decade in mapping casting as a cultural practice. This progress must now be matched by a more nuanced understanding of the pressures that make it impractical to cast certain parts in isolation, requiring directors to think more about collaboration and a collective.

Possible topics may include:

• the coupling of masters and apprentices working for the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men
• histories of actor couples and siblings; famous acting collaborations
• casting comic double acts
• minding resemblance and/or symmetry in casting
• queer casting of couples
• ‘culturally competent’ casting of siblings, parents and children, or lovers (Hartley, Dunn, and Berry, 2021)
• challenges of documenting casting practices

3. Shakespeare and Gesture (Prof Brian Cummings, University of York, and Prof Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)

Gesture is fundamental to human communication, as natural and expressive as speech. In drama, it might be considered a link between language and performance since it is the body’s way of talking. In Shakespeare’s age, gesture was understood as a primary site of rhetoric, a way of giving visible proof of emotions such as grief, joy, anger, or despair, or else to negotiate relationships of love, power, obedience or rebellion. If modern societies privilege spontaneity in physical demonstration, everyday gestures remind us that much of our behaviour is ritualized. Perhaps in a similar way, modern theories of acting prioritize naturalistic models of bodily practice, in reaction to older styles where rhetorical convention was taken for granted. An additional point of pressure and anxiety is formed by early modern religious controversy, Protestant and Catholic, about the ritual use of the body in kneeling, laying on of hands, kissing, bowing, or blessing. Social and sacred ritual punctuates the bodily rhythms of the plays of Shakespeare and other British and European playwrights. This seminar invites consideration both of general or theoretical issues of gesture, and individual gestures of hand, head, lips, arms, knees or any aspect of bodily performance. It invites inter-disciplinary approaches, historical and contemporary, in relation to subjects such as performance studies, stage history (including stage directions, entrances and exits), gender and sex, comedy and slapstick, grief and mourning, religious and political ceremony, anthropology, intersubjectivity, and embodiment. We especially invite a dynamic conversation on these issues between practitioners and academics.

4. Practicing Shakespeare: Using autotheory to decolonialise Shakespeare Studies (Dr Koel Chatterjee, Trinity Laban)

Auto theory is described as a contemporary art form that blurs the line between life and work, theory and practice, and personal and scholarly writing. In 2015, Somali American writer Sofia Samatar explained in a tweet that ‘Autotheory is a word for writing that integrates autobiography and social criticism.’ Lauren Fournier has read autotheory as a multimedial practice by artists and writers who have ties to a global art world. In Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (2021), she contextualizes autotheory within contemporary art to consider ways in which LGBTQ2SIA+, women, and BIPOC artists and writers wrestle with and subvert the dominant logics of the “master discourse” of what has been called theory and philosophy in Euro-American academic spaces through their embodied and autobiographic work. Moreover, autotheory is highlighted as a method that challenges Eurocentric ways of knowing and contributes to decolonial approaches to knowledge production and subject formation. Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano describes decoloniality as an interrogation of the very structures of knowledge production and subject formation established and maintained by colonial modernity and its ongoing institutional instantiations. Thus, Autotheory can be understood, not only as a scholarly genre, but also as a methodology rather than as a final result or a specific aesthetic. It is first and foremost an opportunity for a maker (i.e., a writer, a researcher, or an artist) to make sense of reality through a profound, embodied, and possibly speculative processing of theory and art in order to better open up past, present, and future worlds. An acknowledgement of those fields implies an acceptance of others, their realities, and their sense-making attempts.

Papers submitted to this seminar would ideally be looking at practice as research or practice-led research on adapting or appropriating Shakespeare in any format or genre dealing with issues of identity, gender, race, genre, location, or postcoloniality to name a few, as well as how we can decolonise Shakespeare by moving away from Eurocentric modes of Shakespeare criticism or Shakespeare making by using our own individual encounters with Shakespeare as a framework for research.

5. How did Elizabethan paratextual documents function as part of performance and performance creation? (Lizzie Conrad Hughes, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham and Valentina Vinci, Shake-Scene Shakespeare)

Works such as Tiffany Stern’s Documents of Performance have initiated a reconsideration of playtexts and thinking on performance through the motley and tattered array of surviving documents, including offstage Plots (or Plats, or Plattes), scenarios, outlines, prologues and epilogues, prop lists, songs, parts, cued parts, and making cases for other documents lost to history. These documents offer tantalising glimpses of the business and practice of the play-making, before and during the ephemeral experience of performance, and invite researchers to consider the process of theatre-making in the busy and explosively inventive professional Elizabethan playmaking industry.

While these documents offer glimpses into the process of early modern theater-making, it is when combining document-based and practical research approaches that their potential impact on our understanding may become clear. In the convenors’ own research-practice, for example, working with Plots in a series of research workshops helped clarify the Plot’s probable role in this process, moving on understanding of it and its theatre-makers from three hundred years of theory and supposition alone. 

For this seminar, we invite papers which consider all aspects of documents of performance, and modes of document-based and practical exploration which might clarify current understanding, and create some new areas for further investigation. How might such documents be used to inform or augment modern practice? What insights might be gained from modern practice, training and experience, when considering these documents? What innovative explorations or stagings might be suggested or imagined through the combination of practice and research into these documents? Could further cases be made for lost categories of documents?

As part of the seminar, there will be the opportunity to test some of the practical approaches with actors and seminarians.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Process for and conduct of cuing (actors, musicians, sound/stage effects)
• Contributions of players to text development
• Working with prompt copies, etc
• The nature of the Prompter’s role
• Parts, their function and their contribution to performance
• Perspectives on touring varied venues
• Stage-management of large prop moments (beds, chariots etc)
• Music and musicians in performance
• Roles and functions of those involved offstage
• Implications for rehearsal
• The case for “lost” documents
• Uses of stage-managerial documents

6. Shakespeare in Theory, Theory in Practice (Dr Alexander Thom, University of Leeds)

The idea of ‘theory’ often connotes abstraction, detachment — a well-ventilated but, at times, opaque arcanum. By contrast, ‘practice’ perhaps implies a more rugged, pragmatic enterprise, in which a craft and art is exercised and honed in ‘real world’ conditions. Not unlike Raphael’s ‘The School of Athens’, the former is often assumed to point, speculatively, upwards and outwards; while the latter remains grounded due to its emphasis on corporeality, if not materiality. But, of course, theory is itself a form of practice; and practice is never entirely free from theory, at least on the level of working assumptions. In this seminar, participants are invited to make theoretically-informed contributions on Shakespeare and practice.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Embodied cognition and cognisant bodies in Shakespeare
• Practices that depend on theory and/or theories that depend on practice in Shakespeare (political, religious, ethical)
• The relationship between practice and ideology
• Theorising performances and/or performing theories
• Critical debates on the successes and/or failures of ‘theory’ in
• Shakespeare studies
• The value of dividing and opposing theory from practice and/or the value of their reintegration
• New theoretical perspectives on Shakespeare and/or practice

7. Practising Methodologies (Ann-Sophie Bosshard, Lukas Arnold, Timothy Holden, and Jifeng Huang, University of Zurich)

From ecocriticism to sensory studies, affect theory, historical phenomenology, disability studies, mobility studies and many more – multifarious methodological approaches abound in contemporary early modern literary studies in general and Shakespeare studies in particular. The seminar “Practising Methodologies” encourages especially early career scholars to discuss the methodological approaches they employ in their projects in small peer-groups and to thus test, query, refresh and reappraise recent and more traditional approaches. To achieve this aim, participants will be asked to present their methodology in a short paper that (a) delineates their methodology, (b) highlights potential challenges they face, and (c) suggests how their approach could be mobilised to read a passage from a Shakespeare play that they work with and that speaks to their methodological considerations. At the conference, participants will then discuss their approaches in small groups and test them by reading selected passages of their suggested plays together. Finally, the seminar group will reconvene to consolidate our findings by reflecting on the exchange of methodological perspectives: What have we gained from the practise of thinking about, criticising, and using our respective methodologies? And how can we practise early modern literary studies in light of the new methodologies of the 21st century? In the purposefully open and inclusive setting of this seminar, the focus lies not on research outputs, but on approaches in development. Hence, this seminar invites open-minded participants to discuss their work-in-progress with peers at a similar career stage, to receive peer feedback, and to thus strengthen the methodological framework of their ongoing projects.