Visualisation and Performance on the Early Modern Stage: a theatre workshop with Tiffany Stern and Imre Besanger

To sign up, please contact vondelscentury@gmail.com.

You are invited to join an interactive workshop on practical theatre conditions in early modern Europe. The workshop is associated with the conference The Early Modern Stage Between Baroque and Enlightenment: Vondel’s Century (CREMS, 20-21 September) based on the stage career of the most important Dutch playwright of the seventeenth century, Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679), who wrote over thirty plays, including history plays, biblical drama, pastoral tragi-comedy and translations from authors such as Sophocles and Euripides. No prior knowledge of Vondel or of the Dutch language is required, just come along with any knowledge or questions you have about drama.

The workshop, led by Professor Tiffany Stern of the Birmingham Shakespeare Institute and Imre Besanger, actor and director of Theatre Company Kwast, a group specializing in 17th and 18th-century Dutch repertoire, looks at the various aspects of early modern performance that raise questions about the relationship between the visual and the verbal, and about non-dramatic forms of representation, such as the dumb show and the tableaux-vivant. It offers a brilliant opportunity to learn something about a theatre culture less well known, but certainly no less vibrant than that of the Shakespearean stage, and to think about differences and similarities and differences between vernacular theatre cultures.

After discussing aspects of early modern theatrical rehearsal and performance practices, we will do some hands-on work reading and interpreting a famous scene from Vondel’s celebrated history play Gijsbrecht van Amstel (1638) about the siege and destruction of Amsterdam in 1300. We will be looking in more depth at the scene in which a messenger brings news about an attack on a nunnery. We will do a couple of exercises moving from text to enactment to explore the language of the body in early modern theatrical performance, and the relationship between what is seen and what is imagined. An English translation of the scene will be made available.