ANTONY + CLEOPATRA

Performed at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama - Studio 201

HIGHLIGHT REEL

SUMMARY AND CREDITS

Antony + Cleopatra deconstructs Shakespeare’s classic story of love and betrayal to explore the contemporary American experience of being Black and being Female in the United States. Texts were woven into the text from the Sandra Bland incident, bell hooks, Iggy Azalea, and other recent and relevant discussions about race and power in America. The performances staged provocative imagery from contemporary popular culture over Shakespeare’s text. The resulting performance challenged the audience to engage in the same questions we wrestled with as a team about power, race, wealth, opportunism, and public image.

The Lighting Design incorporated both television and theatrical strategies of lighting, with an eye toward balancing the two. The performance format layered recorded and spoken media together over live-action that was then captured on live-camera feed and mediated in real time as the feed was sent to television screens around the space. Illumination was neither wholly for camera or for the audience’s human eye. The strategy was to underline the emotional and intellectual overtones of each scene, in some cases muddying a look onstage because of the needs of the camera, or vice versa.

For example, in some scenes we wanted what was HEARD to be paramount, so we blew out the video image with bright stage lighting.
In other scenes, the narrative needed our audience to be unclear about what was happening, just in the same way the characters were, so the stage would be come very dim, or very saturated causing the camera feed to become the only easily discernible way to see, and highlighting the dichotomy between civilian recordings and media representation.

Bishop says: “My vision for this piece was to take the misogynoir (race-based misogyny) inherent in Shakespeare's text and use it as a base to explore contemporary representations of black womanhood in America, as well as a critique of 'white feminism'. The adaptation was done by myself, a white feminist and director, with Chanté Adams, a black feminist and performer of Cleopatra. The tension inherent in this collaboration was an important part of the piece itself. Live camera was used to draw attention to the construction of image and the question of 'the gaze'. Also included in the piece were documentary interviews with female performers of color.”

The source reading list for the piece can be found on her website as well.

PHOTO GALLERY

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