Remixing Shakespeare

Remixing Shakespeare was a collaborative live performance event staged at Karpeles Manuscript Museum in partnership with The Folger Shakespeare Library, University of Minnesota Duluth, and KUMD radio. In honor of the national tour of Shakespeare’s First Folio, Alan Sparhawk created original music to accompany early silent film adaptations of Shakespeare. Low improvised the live score to the night of video projections. I was invited to generate additional experimental video that could play-off the well-known literary content and work with Low’s haunting sound.

For the October event, I wanted to incorporate the storms, shipwrecks, witches, and other spooky motifs from Shakespeare’s plays. While creating the remix projections, I collaborated with dancer Rebecca Katz Harwood who improvised and choreographed Shakespeare story vignettes in UMD’s Motion + Media Across Disciplines Lab chromakey studio. By using the green screen, I was able to “key out” the dancers, layering their bodies with book textures and historical references, borrowing from the material culture of The Folger Library’s collection and riffing on Shakespearean themes. On the night of the event, the Karpeles architectural space was awash with rhythmically overlapping video, projected onto the ceiling and walls, programmed by multimedia artist Kathy McTavish.