News Release — For info contact Lori Melton, [email protected], 218-726-8830.
M. J. Kidnie, professor of English, Western University (Ontario, Canada) will present the 17th Annual Jankofsky Lecture on Friday, April 15, at 4 pm in Griggs Center on UMD's campus. Kidnie’s lecture is entitled “Storytelling, Staging, and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The event, sponsored by the UMD English Department though the Klaus P. Jankofsky Fund for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided.”
In the summer of 2014, Antoni Cimolino, artistic director of the Stratford Festival, programmed not one, but two, productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as part of a season designed to explore “Minds Pushed to the Edge.
The first was a main-house staging of Dream directed by Chris Abraham, which has since ironically been described as “My Big Fat Gay Shakespearean Wedding.” The second production was also called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it was subtitled “A Chamber Play” - directed by Peter Sellars, it was performed by four actors. It was staged in none of Stratford’s four, world-class theatres, but at the Masonic Concert Hall, slightly renovated for the purpose.
Kidnie will analyze these stagings of Dream, with particular attention to issues of immersive space. She will build on this discussion of ambient space to talk about the way rehearsal method and creative process shaped language and character, eventually concluding by thinking about the dynamic between space and storytelling.
The Jankofsky Lecture Series was established in 1999 when a former student anonymously donated funds to the UMD English Department as a tribute to Professor Klaus Jankofsky’s career of outstanding teaching and scholarship in the field of medieval and renaissance studies. The first lecture was held in 2000.