Red Bull Theater Announces SALON SEMINAR SERIES: EXPLORING OTHELLO IN 2020

RED BULL THEATER today announced the participants for Salon Seminar Series: EXPLORING OTHELLO IN 2020. These webinar/livestream matinee discussions, bringing together a group of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) theater artists to read and discuss Shakespeare's Othello with celebrated Shakespeare scholar, Ayanna Thompson, will take place on Wednesday afternoons October 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th, all at 2PM EDT. The discussion is viewable LIVE by all with advance registration. Registered webinar attendees will also have the opportunity to offer questions and insights to the cohort throughout the endeavor. Each discussion will also be livestreamed and the recordings will be available on this webpage.

"As a theater company devoted to revitalizing the classics with a particular focus on Shakespeare and his Jacobean contemporaries, we are thrilled to provide an occasion and space for a communal online experience. We are looking forward to listening and learning more about the intersection between race and classical theater," said Jesse Berger.

Over the course of four Wednesday afternoons, Red Bull Theater will bring together a group of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) theater artists to read and discuss Shakespeare's Othello with celebrated Shakespeare scholar, Ayanna Thompson. Each week artists Keith Hamilton Cobb, Franchelle Stewart Dorn, Jennifer Ikeda, Anchuli Felicia King, Peter Macon, Alfredo Narciso, Madeline Sayet, Jessika D. Williams, and Dawn Monique Williams will read a portion of Shakespeare's play and discuss its intersections with 2020.

This Salon Seminar series is part of OTHELLO 2020, a multi-program initiative providing an engaging and educational experience for all who are interested in Shakespeare's Othello and the world in which we live today. Beginning with a RemarkaBull Podversation with Patrick Page: EXPLORING IAGO, the series will continue through October 28. The online-only initiative also includes an informal reading of Keith Hamilton Cobb's AMERICAN MOOR, which the company produced Off-Broadway in the fall of 2019, and a premiere reading of Anchuli Felicia King's new play KEENE, concerning the first known African American actor to perform the role of Othello.

Ayanna Thompson's introduction to the current Arden Shakespeare edition of Othello attends to the play's different meanings throughout history, while articulating the historical context in which Othello was created. Her research pays particular attention to Shakespeare's source materials and the evidence about early modern constructions of racial and religious difference. It also explores the life of the play in different historical moments, demonstrating how meanings and performances develop, accrue, and metamorphose over time. Thompson is Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) and Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of Blackface (forthcoming Bloomsbury, 2021), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach, co-authored with Laura Turchi (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello (Arden, 2016), and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (forthcoming Cambridge University Press, 2021), Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave, 2010), and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). She is currently collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus. She was the 2018-19 President of the Shakespeare Association of America, and served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars. She was one of Phi Beta Kappa's Visiting Scholars for 2017-2018.

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