Learstorm

LEARSTORM is a radically streamlined version of the King Lear text that largely flattens the narrative arc, jettisoning virtually all of the family melodrama and royal court intrigue that occupy its pages. In place of the abandoned content, a mashup of text poached from the playwright’s other classic works highlights the violence of the storm as a necessary cathartic reckoning and revelatory force.  This thread travels through a great number of Shakespeare’s plays, literally or metaphorically, and voices from a dozen of his works are channeled and woven together in Learstorm to harness, amplify and deepen the poetic resonance of the playwright’s insight, and its remarkable contemporary relevance.

The LEARSTORM project is rooted in an ongoing inquiry into a striking contemporary resonance to be found in the text of Shakespeare’s King Lear. This ongoing intermedia exploration that has combined performance, communal dining and tableware design, but revolves principally around a graphic narrative that will take the form of neither comic book nor theatrical script, but perhaps a hybrid of the two. In short, Shakespeare’s original King Lear concerns a patriarch who rages against his perceived victimhood, after relinquishing a lifelong stranglehold on power to female heirs once they bring to an end both the monarch’s entitlements and their prior deference to him. At the play’s heart, however, is the protagonist’s full reckoning with his own cancerous past behaviour, brought on by an earthshaking storm.  Striking parallels can be found not only in the current rise of authoritarianism (and the surging misogynism and white rage that has accompanied it), but in the unfolding horror of climate crisis.