ABSTRACT
The street spectacle Sua Incelença, Ricardo III [His Excellency, Richard III] (2011), by Clowns de Shakespeare, is a Brazilian intercultural production of Richard III framed in a specific context: the action of Shakespeare’s play has been reset and re-contextualized to the region of the cangaço in northeast Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century and thus generates new expressive potentials and unusual communicative energies. In fact, when plays travel in this way across time and place, they aggregate hybrid specificities between the local and the global. In Brazil, Shakespeare’s texts have, since the nineteenth century, been appropriated to serve multiple purposes in different times and socio-cultural contexts, in a movement of persistent interplay of past and present, demanding continual adjustment to new circumstances, ideologies and cultural imaginaries. Our discussion of Sua Incelença, Ricardo III illustrates the experimental tendencies typical to contemporary performance practices and considers the work of Clowns de Shakespeare as important to the historical trajectory of Shakespearean production in Brazil.
