<i>Caesar</i> Re-Configured: An Ensemble Presentation of Improvised Permutations

Abstract

Many years ago it used to be claimed that one must ‘perform the play as Shakespeare wrote it’. Today the absurdity of this is more or less recognized: nobody knows what scenic form he had in mind. All that one knows is that he wrote a chain of words that have in them the possibility of giving birth to forms that are constantly renewed. There is no limit to the virtual forms that are present in a great text. A mediocre text may only give birth to a few forms, whereas a great text, a great piece of music, a great opera score are true knots of energy. Like electricity, like all sources of energy, energy itself does not have a form, but it has a direction, a power.
(Peter Brook)1