Dehierarchizing Space: Performer-Audience Collaborations in Two Portuguese Performances of Shakespeare

This article addresses the key role of performance space in mediating between cultural locations. It discusses two Portuguese performances of Shakespeare where audiences were invited to become part of the performance and the ways in which this dehierarchization of the performance space framed a cross-cultural encounter between a globalized text and a localized performance context. In Teatro Oficina’s 2012 King Lear, both audience and performers sat around a large table in a production which reflected upon questions of individual and collective responsibility in Shakespearean tragedy and in the wider political sphere. In the middle of this performance space hung a large cube onto which the translated text was projected, setting up a spatial tension between text and performance that also foregrounded the translocation of the Shakespearean text to a Portuguese performance context. In Tiago Rodrigues’ 2013 By Heart, ten members of the audience were invited onstage to learn Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 “by heart and not by brain.”1 In doing so, Rodrigues emphasized the cultural embeddedness of Shakespearean texts in a wider European cultural context and operated a subtle shift from texts to performance as a privileged repository for the cultural memory of Shakespeare. The article explores how these spatial shifts signaled the possibility of enabling cross-cultural identifications with Shakespeare through performance

Eco city development in China: addressing the policy implementation challenge

Over the last few decades, China has seen a steep rise in diverse eco city and low carbon city policies. Recently, attention has begun to focus on the perceived shortcomings in the practical delivery of related initiatives, with several publications suggesting a gap between ambitious policy goals and the emerging realities of the newly built environment. To probe this further, in this article we examine – based on the policy network approach – how the gap between high-level national policies and local practice implementation can be explained in the current Chinese context. We develop a four-pronged typology of eco city projects based on differential involvement of key (policy) actor groups, followed by a mapping of what are salient policy network relations among these actors in each type. Our analysis suggests that, within the overall framework of national policy, a core axis in the network relations is that between local government and land developers. In some cases, central government agencies– often with buy-in from international architecture, engineering and consulting firms – seek to influence local government planning through various incentives aimed at rendering sustainability a serious consideration. However, this is mostly done in a top-down manner, which overemphasizes a rational, technocratic planning mode while underemphasizing interrelationships among actors. This makes the emergence of a substantial implementation gap in eco city practice an almost predictable outcome. Consequently, we argue that special attention be paid in particular to the close interdependency between the interests of local government actors and those of land and real estate developers. Factoring in this aspect of the policy network is essential if eco city implementation is to gain proper traction on the ground

Organisation

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