ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ballet, modern dance, and hip-hop versions of four Shakespearean tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Titus Andronicus. The ten productions explored in this chapter take a strongly psychoanalytical approach to the plays, using dance as a way to convey the interiors of the characters’ minds, particularly those who struggle with madness. The embodied and primarily visual performances of the dancers engage in new ways with Shakespeare’s explorations of how violence, trauma, and death affect his characters. The adaptations use choreography and staging to suggest that we are inside the minds of the characters, through cyclical structures, dream-like elements, or repetition. The chapter analyzes how choreographers use male/male and male/female pas de deux to represent the tragic relationships in Othello and Macbeth, as well as the devices of doubling and fragmentation to explore psychological trauma in Hamlet and Titus Andronicus.
