Members of Cornell's Department of Performing and Media Arts are participating in the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Boston March 19-22.
PMA Senior Lecturer Theo Black is leading a workshop entitled "Suiting Action to Word: Laban Technique and Shakespeare," co-facilitated with eCornell instructor Alex Manuel Teicheira.
During the conference's first-ever undergraduate seminar, PMA major Tess Lovell ’25 is presenting her paper, “Who is Ophelia, Really?: Plants, Embodiment, and Making it Up to Hamlet’s Tragic Heroine.” The paper discusses BIOphelia, a multi-disciplinary event held at the Schwartz Center in Fall 2024. Lovell and two PMA alumni – Amanda Vialva ’23 and Rohan Misra ‘23 – will also participate in Black's workshop.
Black’s workshop will allow scholars to engage with the Laban practice. “Within Laban are immediately accessible ways for actors to get Shakespeare’s characters into our bodies and share indelible stories with our audiences,” Black said.
Misra will be working with the opening soliloquy of “Richard III” during the workshop. “The plan is to use myself and my former company-mates to illustrate the viability of Laban movement analysis (categorizing movement along three axes: strength, flexibility and duration) in Shakespearean monologue,” he said.
Vialva is adapting Countess Olivia from “Twelfth Night” in American Sign Language, a project generated during Black’s advanced directing course. “I am thrilled to revisit Olivia once again, conveying her words in both American Sign Language and English. Incorporating the Laban technique into Olivia's modes of speech and movement can enlighten new character dynamics and heighten the stake of the scene.”
Tess Lovell will partner with professional actor Teicheira to illuminate scene-work’s dynamic potential via Laban, engaging Lady Macbeth and her husband in an intensely dramatized exchange.
“All three of these students/alums have engaged not only this technique with me in-depth, but also brilliantly adapted Shakespeare to make it resonant in salient ways now,” Black said. When asked what he hopes attendees take away from this workshop, he said “Fearless, empowered, and excited engagement with Shakespeare, poetry, drama and relation to their own expressive capabilities.”
Lovell reflected on her seminar ahead of the event: “Two years ago, Theo introduced me to the wild world of eco-Shakespeare, and the concept of [“theater for social change”] started to become clearer,” she said. “Plants and nature are marginalized groups in today’s world, and when we foreground them, or allow them to act as co-stars to their human counterparts, we take a small step towards a less anthropocentric lifestyle. That is no small feat in our increasingly technology-driven, consumption-crazed lives.”
“There is a lot of existing scholarship on the role of plants in Hamlet, especially in relation to the character of Ophelia,” Lovell continued. “Throughout the BIOphelia symposium, we strove to bridge some of that theory with embodied performance in order to make it resonate with an audience… I hope that I can offer up a new lens through which to consider Ophelia’s character beyond her innocence, helplessness, and tragic end.”
Co-facilitated by Cornell Associate Professor Jessica Rosenberg, in the Literatures in English department, BIOphelia is also poised to be re-staged under at The New Swan Shakespeare Center in 2026.
Read more about the Shakespeare conference.
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