(Dis) Locating Shakespeare: Mak Yong and A Midsummer Night’s Dream meet New Media Archive

Abstract

This paper considers the life/ after-life of a Malay adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mak Yong Titis Sakti (Mak Yong Drops of Magic) by the Actors Studio (2009) in the digital environment of the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A). The paper examines how Shakespeare’s canonical text and the traditional Kelantanese ritual form of Mak Yong are mutually re-created and re-networked as media materials in a new media archive. The focus of the paper is Dennis Kennedy’s provocatively formulated question: “What is it that endures when (Shakespeare) is deprived of his tongue?” (Foreign Shakespeare). Here, watching a performance in another linguistic and performance idiom is made more complex by the fact that Shakespeare has not only been “deprived of his tongue”, but also of his more conventional and accepted space: the theatre. I will look closely at how the Mak Yong form, which has already been significantly adapted and modernized for a contemporary audience of Kuala Lumpur, is further re-mediated and back-translated into English for a global audience on the internet. The paper will also focus on the processes of digital archiving and how the traditional Mak Yong form operates within the newly emergent space of new media archive. The paper probes how the process of remediation involved dislocates both Shakespeare and the traditional art form to form a new media text that opens up unexpected avenues of meaning-making for the spectator.