Shakespeare and Nos do Morro

Nos do Morro has a history of working with Shakespeare. Cicely Berry has been giving workshops here since 1995. The company produced A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2004, and more recently for the RSC's complete works festival in 2006, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The essay by Beatriz Resende in the Nos do Morro book quotes philosopher Giorgio Agamben in relation to their approach to the Bard;
"To desecrate is not simply to abolish and cancel separations, but to learn to make new meanings from them, a new use, to play with them. The desecration of the sacred is the political task of the next generation."
(from Profanations, G. Agamben 2007, with apologies for the sacreligious translation).
This sentence is at the heart of my current work with Shakespeare. In 2007, I visited Nos do Morro with the playwright, Oladipo Agboluaje, to discover, together with the company, a rewriting of Shakespeare's The Tempest. The result was Dipo's play Knock Against My Heart, making Shakespeare's story relevant to the politics and economics of the 21st Century.
This time, my workshops mix Shakespearean words with the words from the hill and the Vidigal writers write about their day to day concerns. There is much hilarity as the group creates newly minted sentences and turns of phrase. I hope the writers have new texts and ideas to take forward. There are the beginnings of a play here. The house that fell into the sea and the event of the death of Celeste, the legendary owner of Bar-raco, are a stories that stay with me long after.