Hello to you all!<P>For the period february/march 2003, I am seriously looking for and selecting a very good and new (or recent) dance production <BR>inspired by Shakespeare's work.<BR> <BR>The place of performance would be in Italy.<P>So the ballet should have never been previously performed in Italy. <BR> <BR>Please send any serious indications or proposal to:<BR> <BR>agon@inwind.it<BR> <BR>Thanks.

What about Twelfth Night. It has all the good elements.<P>Romantic interludes, mistaken identity, girls dressed as boys, a jester, a maid, an old fat guy.

Agone - welcome to the board, I am glad you got my e-mail and suggestion to post your question here.<P>It's a pleasure to have you join us.

Hi agone! To make our suggestions meaningful it might be helpful if you told us the size of the venue you would be using. There are a lot of full-length ballets made from Shakespeare, but they would not be suitable in a 200-seater dance house.

Does the performance have to be ballet? If not, what about Rennie Harris PureMovement's "Rome and Jewels" (based on Romeo & Juliet)? It is hip-hop dance, and I know they were recently in the UK on tour, so they may have gone elsewhere in Europe as well, I'm not sure. <P>Otherwise, I am hard-pressed to think of many recent Shakespeare ballets. The most recent I can think of is "Othello" choreographed by Lar Lubovitch for American Ballet Theatre. There are several decent versions of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"- Balanchine's (which I'm sure has been performed in Italy before), Bruce Marks' version for the Boston Ballet, and Christopher Wheeldon's version for the Colorado Ballet (the most recent of the 3 versions I just mentioned). Also, there are the John Cranko versions of "Romeo & Juliet" and "The Taming of the Shrew" but I'm sure those have been performed in Italy at some point as well.<P>I'm sure there are plenty of other good Shakespeare ballets out there, this is just what I can think of quickly.<P>Who will be performing this Shakespeare dance? Are you looking for a company to come and perform the work, or are you looking for a work that will be performed by an Italy-based troupe?

A new resource for anyone thinking about choreographing Shakespeare:

Shakespearean text lives online
From the BBC website


Scholars can see how the text changes across editions
Fans of Shakespeare are getting the chance to thumb through some of the earliest copies of the Bard's plays.
The British Library is putting online 93 high-resolution digitised copies of 21 of Shakespeare's plays.

The texts date from Shakespeare's lifetime and are pamphlet editions of plays prepared to be sold after performances had finished.

The printed works show how the text evolved and cast doubt on the idea of definitive versions of his plays.

click for more

Hello, CD friends, just a FYI if you're interested in things Shakespearean there is an academic list-serv (which my professor had us all join) called SHAKSPER:

Browsing the about 70+ hits resulting from a SEARCH with "ballet" and "dance" found a few threads with performance reviews (ABTs “The Dream” on PBS, etc). There was 1 or 2 queries w/ ballet questions that any regular on CD would be able to answer without any sweat (e.g. Q: Weren’t there ballet versions of R&J suggesting an erotic relationship between Lady Capulet and Tybalt?). Nor surprisingly from a list-serv dominated by the literary minded, there are a few threads expressing dread at violating “Hamlet” or some other Shakespeare Great Work by turning it into a movie or (heaven forbid) a ballet.

The only interesting thread re: dance was a mention of a news story from 1995 or 1996 about a grade school principal who declined complimentary tickets for her school to see a ballet R&J because it was (as she had it) both heterosexist and an art form that would be of no interest to her working class pupils. http://www.shaksper.net/archives/1998/0198.html

There isn't a whole lot right now in SHAKSPER that is really exciting for the dance enthusiast since it's mostly devoted to fairly academic and sometimes esoteric discussions on Shakespeare. But, if you want to discuss “chiastic formations” in Q1 Hamlet or such burning textual questions as “… whether the compositor's copy for Richard II (Q1597) consisted of a manuscript (foul or fair) in Shakespeare's hand or was a scribal transcript in the hand of another” etc, then SHAKESPER is for you. You don’t need to be admitted to the list-serv to browse, only to post.

<small>[ 15 September 2004, 04:18 PM: Message edited by: Jeff ]</small>

Hello, CD friends, a Shakespeare fyi I learned from SHAKSPER:

Just in time for all the Shakespeare options being unleahed on the summer metropolis, Google recently premiered a new Shakespeare web resource:

From their press release:



Check it out at: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/shakespeare/

And, speaking of summer Shakespeare, my graduate advisor e-mailed us a list of summer Shakespeare options for southern California including Shakespeare by the Sea (www.shakespearebythesea.org), Long Beach Shakespeare (www.lbshakespeare.org, Shakespeare Orange County (www.chapman.edu/shakespeare), and more.