Looking for Shakespeare
Shakespeare is appropriated by educators and others to serve their own purposes (Allen, 1991, p. 42–43), whether they be to teach the heritage of English literature, to perpetuate the examinations system, the Shakespeare industry and its Bardolatry, or, in this case, to promote adolescent response. The perspective from which Looking for Shakespeare begins is that of an inquiry into the layers of personal meaning in the play: Shakespeare’s “open text” challenges participants to reassess and transform their perceptions and their worldview (Allen, 1991, p. 45). A four–week intensive theatre workshop for adolescents which began at New York University in 1999, the program was conceived for inner–city adolescents who may not have had any theatre background to get to know and to perform a Shakespeare play. We adopted an integrated arts approach, employing improvisation, role play, visual art, creative writing, movement and music to explore and illuminate the text.
The haunted theatre
Forests, the production by the iconoclastic Spanish-Catalan director Calixto Bieito staged at the ‘Old’ Birmingham Repertory Theatre in September 2012, functions here as the starting point for an exploration of the way a radical revisioning of Shakespeare in performance stimulated through an engagement with European modernism began in this now venerable theatre over 100 years ago. What was dubbed Bieito’s ‘epic arboreal mash-up’ was I suggest haunted by the material traces of groundbreaking past performances mounted by the Rep’s founder Barry Jackson, which included the first Shakespeare in modern-dress productions of the 1920s and the highly influential 1951–53 staging of the Henry VI trilogy.
The General Theory of Relativity
THE WORD “SPECIAL” IN “SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY” means that the theory is restricted to those frames of reference for which the law of inertia holds, that is, inertial frames of reference.* Einstein sometimes referred to them as Galilean frames of reference. At first glance, it does not seem reasonable to expect that the principle of relativity can be extended to non-inertial frames. The reasons are fairly obvious. The principle of relativity that we have been using states that the laws of physics have the same form in all frames of reference to which the principle applies. In other words there should be no way to determine by an experiment which of two frames of reference is in motion relative to the other.