Staging Anachronism: A film screening, discussion, and dinner

The "Year of Anachronism" in the Department of Comparative Literature is drawing to a close, and we'd like to invite you to discuss and celebrate it with us.

What are the stakes involved in restaging a narrative out of its time? Our informal film screening and discussion approaches this question in an exploration of two anachronistic productions of early modern dramas: Julie Taymor’s 2010 film of Shakespere’s The Tempest and the Mark Morris Dance Group's 1989 work on Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas. These two recent retellings perform anachronism by avoiding reference to any particular historical moment. They also both take liberties with the representation of gender in the narrative: Prospero becomes Prospera in Taymor's The Tempest, and Mark Morris himself originated the roles of Dido and the Sorceress. An abbreviated screening of these two productions will serve as a starting point for a discussion of anachronism’s potentials and pitfalls—aesthetic and methodological—followed by a light dinner.