Call for Proposals: Creative Text for Musical Performance – World Shakespeare Congress 2026

In celebration of the World Shakespeare Congress 2026, organised in Verona (Italy) by the Skenè Research Centre, University of Verona, in collaboration with the International Shakespeare Association from 20 to 26 July 2026, the Conservatory Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco of Verona invites artists from all over the world to submit proposals for a creative text to accompany an original musical composition. This collaborative project seeks to merge music and narrative, offering a unique performance in tribute to the timeless legacy of Shakespeare, exploring themes, motifs, or interpretations inspired by his work.

This is an opportunity for artists from all over the world to showcase a brand-new work specifically devised for premiering at the WSC in 2026.

Project Specifics

—   Language: The text must be written in English and can include passages in other languages.

—   Performance Duration: The texts must be designed for a performance of approximately 90 minutes, considering

§  20-30 minutes of music directly interacting with or contextualising the spoken text, enhancing the storytelling experience.

§  at least 20-30 minutes of preludes, interludes, and/or a finale in addition to the spoken text.

§  In the main passages, it is asked to indicate the musical atmosphere which is considered most suitable (the music will be then created at the composers’ discretion).

—   Narrative Form: The narrative can be structured as either

§  a script for a stage action with multiple actors;

§  a dramatic reading performed by 2 or more actors; or

§  a monologue by a single performer.

 

Artistic Guidelines

We encourage proposals that bring a fresh, innovative perspective to themes, characters, or settings that explore the many ways in which Shakespeare may be conceived as ‘planetary’. Artists may choose to adapt or reimagine Shakespeare’s works or craft new stories inspired by their language, legacy, or world. The narrative should be conceived in close relationship with the music, allowing the two forms to complement and enrich one another. The text can explore diverse genres—tragic, comic, historical, or variously experimental—while making full use of the emotional and narrative power of live music.

The selected artist(s) will collaborate closely with the professionals of the Conservatory to make sure that the narrative and the original music harmonise.

 

Submission Requirements

—   Project synopsis (maximum 500 words) outlining the narrative concept and its connection to Shakespeare’s work or legacy, and including technical rider.

—   Sample excerpt (up to 5 pages) or a detailed outline of the text.

—   Description of musical integration, specifying where the music will be placed in relation to the text and how it interacts with the spoken narrative.

—   CV and portfolio: Highlighting relevant experience in writing for performance or other related disciplines.

 

Selection Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated based on

—   creativity;

—   consonance with the theme of the World Shakespeare Congress; 

—   the synergy between text and music;

—   estimate of the production costs for directing, acting and lightning and props (possible venue: Roman Theatre).

 

Deadlines

—    Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2025 

—    Selected artist(s) will be notified by 15 May 2025

—    Deadline for submission of complete work: 15 September 2025

 

This is a unique opportunity to participate in a prestigious global event, collaborating with world-class musicians to create a memorable tribute to Shakespeare through a fusion of music and text.

 

For further details and to submit your proposal, please contact skene@ateneo.univr.it

MEMOs New Encounters: Call for Papers

MEMOs (Medieval and Early Modern Orients) is a decolonial project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that seeks to further knowledge and understanding of the early interactions between England and the Islamic Worlds. The first hybrid MEMOs conference will be held in Cape Town and online from 11-14 December 2025.

The Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa is proud to be partnering with the University of Cape Town and the University of Manchester in supporting this landmark MEMOs event.

CALL FOR PAPERS

In the context of wider postcolonial and decolonial shifts that have occurred in both critical and popular thought over the past decades, we have seen growing interests in recovering and recentering histories of Islamic civilizations and their shaping influence on knowledge, systems, and technologies that we now associate with the modern world. Whether recognized as the powerful authorities that transformed trade, belief, politics, science, and art in the premodern world, or as the ‘other’ necessary for Western colonial self-fashioning, as per Edward Said’s formative theorization of them in Orientalism, there is no denying that Muslims and Islamicate societies hold a fundamental place in our (global) past. Traditions, representations, and experiences of encounters between Muslims and their non-Muslim counterparts in the ‘West’ – or the Global South and Global North respectively – have long been and remain a fundamental site of excavation for this history.

Since its launch in 2019, Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs) has aimed to collaboratively and ethically explore and disseminate these narratives of the past. The events that we have witnessed over the past year are a stark reminder of the urgency of continuing this work, in efforts to decolonize the way Muslim identities and histories are perceived in contemporary thought.

With this in mind, MEMOs is delighted to announce its first hybrid conference to be held from the 11th - 14th of December 2025, in person in Cape Town, South Africa, and online.

We invite proposals for papers, panels, and workshops that address cultural histories of medieval (500-1450 CE) and early modern (1450-1750 CE) encounters between Europeans, especially the English, and the Islamic world across Africa, Asia, and Europe. That is where the Islamic world is broadly defined as imperial and dynastic powers, caliphates, as well as individuals and communities in areas under Muslim rule.

We welcome a wide range of approaches, but are especially interested in papers that examine real and imagined Euro-Islamic interaction and exchange through literature, histories, and cultures including but not exclusive to:

  • Creative expression (including art, music, literature, and theatre)

  • Storytelling, performance, and adaptation (including, though not limited to, the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries)

  • Constructions of race (including Islamophobia and anti-Blackness)

  • Gender formation and experiences

  • Travel, migration, and hospitality

  • Global order and sovereignty

  • Maritime/Oceanic politics and tradition (especially of the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans)

  • The politics of empire, rule, and dynasty

  • Diplomacy, alliance, territory and nationhood

  • Cultures of knowledge and learning

  • Publishing, translations, and print culture

  • Religion and belief

  • Disability and difference

  • Colonial discourse and mechanisms

  • Trade practices and economic transformations

  • Environments, agriculture, and ecology

  • Class and service

Interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches are encouraged.

Abstracts are invited for:

  • Individual 20-minute papers, or complete panels with up to three speakers

  • Roundtable discussions (1 hour) of up to five speakers

  • Proposals for plenary workshops (1-2 hours) that explore teaching or research methodologies

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

AMBEREEN DADABHOY (HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE)

SU FANG NG (VIRGINIA TECH UNIVERSITY)

Please submit proposals (250 words) and a short bio (150 words) to the organizing committee at memorientsconference@gmail.com by 1 March 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by late March.

In-person delegates will be invited to attend workshops, events, and cultural excursions, to be hosted in collaboration with our conference partners. Proposals should indicate whether delegates will attend the event in person or online.

Basotho! Bapedi! O ka bala Shakespeare ...

Two recent additions to our collection of South African Shakespeare translations will be of interest to Sesotho and Sepedi speakers: K.E. Ntsane’s Mohwebi wa Venisi (The Merchant of Venice) and C.N.M. Phatudi’s Julease Sisare (Julius Caesar).

Ntsane’s Mohwebi was published in 1961. This was the first translation of a Shakespeare play to be produced in Sesotho, and it remains the only known full translation. (Isaac Mahloane’s Romeo le Juliet, which appeared in 1964 to mark the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, is a prose synopsis of the play.)

Kemuel Edward Ntsane was born in 1920 in Lesotho. He wrote three novels and two volumes of poetry in Sesotho, documenting the experiences of Basotho migrant workers who had travelled to Johannesburg and the reef to work on the mines, and presenting gentle satirical takes on love gone wrong, the nostalgia of old age or the false piety of the religious (the scholar Johannes Lenake has written extensively on this). Ntsane’s poetic imagination was fuelled equally by the mountain vistas of Lesotho, the conventions of praise poetry, and the grim daily rounds of life in the mining compounds.

You can page through Ntsane’s text here, or download a searchable PDF from Shakespeare ZA’s Translations section.

Mohwebi wa Venisi is also available via the Sol Plaatje Archive of Shakespeare in African Languages (a project of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at Wits University), which collects and catalogues digital copies of translations of Shakespeare’s plays from across the African continent.

C.N.M. (sometimes referred to as N.C.) Phatudi was one of the more prolific South African Shakespeare translators of the twentieth century, producing versions of Julius Caesar, King Henry IV Part One and The Merchant of Venice. The latter text was the last to be published (in 1985) but the first of Phatudi’s translations to be added to Shakespeare ZA’s collection and the Sol Plaatje Archive. Julease Sisare, the new addition, appeared with Better Books in 1971 but this first edition includes a foreword by P.C. Mokgokong of the University of South Africa dated 1965. 1 Henry IV, also published by Better Books, came out in 1973.

The legacy of Cedric Namedi Makepeace Phatudi is a complicated one. He was a teacher, then a school principal, then a supervisor of schools, then a school inspector (he was president of the national body of Inspectors of Bantu Education for over two decades) and eventually Minister of Education in the ‘Homeland’ or Bantustan of Lebowa. Phatudi, whose father had been chief of the Mphahlele people (Kgosi Mmutle III, the subject of Phatudi’s 1966 historical drama), crafted a political path for himself from the 1960s.

By 1973, he was Chief Minister of Lebowa. He was very conscious, given this role, of being perceived as an apartheid crony. Certainly, he was accommodationist in his approach – conciliatory, insisting that different race groups need one another – but he tried to twist the apartheid government’s notion of Separate Development into “a means to an end”. He probably overestimated his negotiating power; while he was successful in persuading Pretoria to allow the exiled writer and intellectual Es’kia Mphahlele to return to South Africa, for instance, he was put squarely in his place when he tried to secure Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.

Despite his anti-apartheid rhetoric, Phatudi was arguably naïve in his hopes that the apartheid state would adopt a federal system in which black South Africans, via “one man one vote” in the homelands, could have meaningful representation in government. Nevertheless, his legacy as an educationist and as a promoter of Sepedi remains significant.

The Tempest returns to Cape Town

The full programme of the 2025 Maynardville Open-Air Festival has been announced, along with the cast of a production of The Tempest to be directed by Sylvaine Strike.

Antoinette Kellerman (photo: Claude Barnardo)

Under the theme “Waves of Wonder”, the 2025 open-air season at Maynardville will run from 22 January to 8 March. The opening concerts include Tour de Tchaikovsky, an evening of chamber music, and Stormy Weather, in which the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra will “explore composers’ expressions of nature’s elements”. During the course of February, Jonathan Roxmouth will headline Sunday in the Park with Sondheim and Cape Town Opera will present a series of extracts from Shakespeare-themed operas.

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Jefferson Lan and Jane de Wet (photo: Claude Barnardo)

The main attraction at Maynardville each year is, of course, a production of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Next year, that play is The Tempest - and it will star doyenne of the South African stage, Antoinette Kellerman, as Prospero.

Albert Pretorius will play Caliban and Daniel Lasker will play Ariel, with Jane de Wet and Jefferson Lan as Miranda and Ferdinand. Other cast members include David Viviers (Antonio), Brent Palmer (Alonso), Tankiso Mamabolo (Sebastian/Trinculo), Siya Mayola (Gonzalo) and Len-Barry Simons, Naoline Quinzin and Lungile Lallie (Spirits). 

Niall Griffin is designing the costumes and set, lighting is by Oliver Hauser, and Wessel Odendaal will compose an original score and soundtrack, with sound design by David Classen.

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Tickets are available via the Maynardville Open-Air Festival website or directly from Quicket.

What might Shakespeare have to do with social justice today?

Sandra Young (photo: Nasief Manie / UCT)

Last week, as part of the University of Cape Town’s Inaugural Lecture Series, Professor Sandra Young delivered a lecture entitled “Exploring the Literary Imagination in Times of Reckoning: What might Shakespeare have to do with social justice today?”

Young (who, as former Head of English Literary Studies at UCT, is also former vice-president of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and co-convenor of the Society’s congresses in 2019 and 2023) began her talk by presenting an overview of her research in the fields of Shakespeare studies, South African literary and cultural studies, and heritage/memory studies over the past two decades. Her scholarship pursues questions of social justice in works both imaginative and historical. Young’s 2019 book, Shakespeare in the Global South: Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation, examines how theatre practitioners reimagine Shakespeare’s works to tell new stories of dispossession, struggle and survival. The Early Modern Global South in Print (2015) traces the emergence of a racialised ‘South’ in early modern maps, geographies, and natural histories. Her current book project (which began during her fellowship earlier this year at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC) is a performance history of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, reflecting on the spectre of slavery within public culture, from 1660 until today. 

Prof Young and colleagues before the event (photo: Nasief Manie / UCT)

It was thus apt that her lecture focused on The Tempest in offering answers to the question, “How do works of the imagination help us to reckon with difficult histories, in a world that continues to feel the impact of centuries of unjust social structures?” Here Young took her cue from Saidiya Hartman who, addressing the ethics and practice of writing about the lives of the enslaved, has asked: “What are the stories one tells in dark times?” This has implications for the writing of history, as well as creative practice, and indeed literary studies - which some regard as an elitist pursuit. But the discipline, Young argued, is also well placed to analyse how cultural practices can secure the interests of the powerful, or challenge them.

The Tempest, as a play that gives pointed attention to slavery and colonisation, offers a rewarding case study. Given the play’s wildly different interpretations historically, archival research tells a fascinating story: before abolition, Shakespeare’s version was almost never performed but was replaced by adaptations that shifted the emphasis away from the figure of Caliban. The enslaved character was thus not treated as human, as one whose plight deserves attention. Later, the treatment of Caliban in the nineteenth century ranged from Coleridge’s “sympathetic imagination” to early eugenics. At the turn of the twentieth century, The Tempest was used to celebrate immigration in the United States; more recently, the figure of Sycorax has been incorporated into memorials to those who died in the Middle Passage. The play thus gestures towards an “underwater archive”. Contemporary artists like Madeline Sayet (Where We Belong) continue to reimagine the play to address the concerns of a new generation.

The lecture can be watched on YouTube. In this video, the event is opened by UCT Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Prof Jeff Murugan. Young is introduced by Dean of the Humanities, Prof Shose Kessi. Prof Chris Thurman of Wits University gives a response and expression of thanks in closing.