From March 15 to 19, NYUAD hosted the Global Shakespeare Festival with participants from eight different universities in the UAE, Egypt and the USA. This festival evolved from an idea to incorporate a Global Shakespeare course in NYUAD’s Literature and Creative Writing curriculum.

In the fall of 2009, the group of four collaborators consisting of the NYUAD Associate Dean of Humanities Cyrus Patell, Associate Professor of Theater Rubén Polendo, Dean of NYU Gallatin Susan Wofford and Vice Provost of the NYUAD Institute Philip Kennedy transformed the idea of Global Shakespeare into a potential conference with the involvement of the student performances. Later it was decided to separate the festival from the conference and hold the festival first.

Patell, who taught the Global Shakespeare course for the first time as part of the core curriculum program in the fall of 2012, saw this idea as “an opportunity for NYUAD to help reconceive the field and become a center for scholarly work, teaching and performance around the idea of Global Shakespeare."

The two official co-directors of the festival, Patell and Polendo, aimed to show through the festival the successful combination of the two disciplines of Arts and Humanities.

“Another of our aims is to show that faculty and students can collaborate productively on both creative work and original scholarship,” Patell said. “In a sense, we view Global Shakespeare as an exemplary manifestation of some of the central ideas behind NYUAD as a mixture of liberal arts college and research university.”

The festival consisted of the theatrical and literature workshops and student performances of the excerpts from the famous works by Shakespeare, followed by the reflective discussion sessions among the participants.

Throughout the festival there was an ongoing argument between the participants whether or not Shakespeare should be considered universal.

“In an afternoon session, students spoke with passion and persuasion of how he did resonate for them as universal, given the different cultural contexts from which they started yet managed to meet here,” said Paulo Horta, Assistant Professor of Literature in NYUAD. “At the same session the scholars present tried to disentangle the terms of Global Shakespeare.”

The clash of these opinions became visual in the student performances. Although some of the troupes took the same excerpts of Shakespeare their approaches to performance were radically different. For example, the students from Cairo University and NYU Tisch both performed the adaptation of “Macbeth.” The group from Cairo chose turning point-action scenes from “Macbeth” and took it into the current Egyptian setting.

“We aimed at attracting the other troupes to the idea of revolt, which was mainly taken from our 2011 Egyptian Revolution,” said Cairo University student Aya Ahmed El Shafei. “We wanted everyone there to go through the same Egyptian experience and to apply the idea of revolt on the Shakespearean texts, which was extremely challenging to us.”

“Although we were both doing ‘Macbeth,’ theirs was completely different,” said NYUNY senior Luke Eisemann. “It had massive weight behind it — it was dragging the whole different history behind it.”

Despite midterms and the ongoing rehearsals for the other upcoming NYUAD student production of “The Odyssey,” NYUAD students put together an original piece that placed Shakespeare in the contemporary setting.

“Our piece was one of the pieces that really took to heart the idea of reconstructing Shakespeare,” said NYUAD sophomore Nikolai Kozac. “We combined contemporary with Shakespeare in a very brutal way, I think it was our risk but it really worked.”

“It left on the audience an emotional effect, rather than rational judgment,“ said NYUAD sophomore Otto Kakhidze.

The fascinating part of this emerging experience from a mix of theater and literature is that not all of the students involved in the performance were professional actors.

“I found the student performances were fantastic, and I was even more impressed upon discovering that in many cases most of these students were not theater majors,” Horta said. “The work with body and movement, as the director from the Swarthmore troupe put it, with embodying Shakespeare, and avoiding talking-head theater where the words did all the work, was particularly impressive.”

According to the organizers and participants, the festival overall can be considered a successful start but there is still room for improvement. This time around, the event was only opened to the NYUAD community but Patell said next time it will be opened to the local community as well.

“The only real disappointment for us was that the [United Arab Emirates University] students couldn't come,” Patell said. “We hope they'll be able to participate in the future. The UAEU theater professor, Jim Mirrione, did attend the whole festival, and in lieu of a performance described a production of ‘The Tempest’ performed at UAEU last year.”

In the matter of three days of collaboration, the participants were able to create a new community of scholars and artists and start building plans for the future projects together.

“Across countries, languages, religions and culture, we came together and created theatre,” said NYUAD sophomore Valentina Vela. “We created an international community that keeps in touch and is making plans for the future. This is what NYUAD was meant to facilitate. It is in events like this where remember why I fell in love with this university.”

“It was like walking into a different house, something that was completely new to me, except everybody was so welcoming that I wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as I thought I’d be,” Eisemann said. “It was a fantastic first step into something that I don’t think has a limit. I so want to do this again.”

In the last reflection session of the festival, El Shafei said, “I’m really grateful to all my Global Shakespeare Festival friends who were very supportive and cheerful. But, I also feel bad when I remember that all of us are heading to the same airport on the following day but to different gates.”

Cairo University student Adham Sayed hopes the festival will become an annual event.

“Meeting and blending with such wondrous, glowing and distinguished souls left a great effect that cannot be described by any words. I hope the festival would take place every year, because it's really something unique,” Sayed said.

Plans are already underway for continuing the festival next year.

“We've talked about including teams from China and India in the future,” Patell said. “We'll certainly do something like this as part of the Shakespeare Project on Saadiyat Island. The festival didn't fit the model of programming that the NYUAD Institute had, but now I think we may be able to get the Institute to think about doing more programming that involves students directly.”