i am your spaniel; or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson

Welcome to a beginner’s lecture on Shakespare’s First Folio text analysis. The lecture covers: grammar and spelling, historical context, misplaced memories, climate disaster, violence, Sam Rockwell, family abolition, masculinity, nepotism, propaganda, inflation, T4T, and talking dogs. No lunch provided.

i am your spaniel, or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson is a drag performance lecture in which Shakespeare scholar Gislina Patterson reads A Midsummer Night’s Dream too closely and turns into a dog. It’s about the family as a site of control, theatre as state propaganda, being in love, becoming a traitor, transformation, desire, Iggy Pop, being good, being bad, and what it means to be a man.

spaniel is a performance of obsessive research, exploring the political circumstances under which Dream was written at the end of a plague and the beginning of European capitalism, land enclosure, witch hunts, criminalization of homosexuality, criminalization of contraception, and the last gasps of workers uprisings in England. Using Iggy Pop, pop-up books, and popular culture, Gislina Patterson’s performance rereads Shakespeare not as a prophet but as a propagandist.

SHOW DETAILS

90 minutes // available for touring // ideal for theatre contexts

REVIEWS:
“A cultural reset.” ~ Frances Koncan
“A brilliant collage of scholarship, anecdote, political theory and visit to the dog park. Woof! ” ~ Glen Sumi
“Takes everything you know about Shakespeare’s most produced play, throws it out the window, and yells, ‘FETCH!’ … If Gislina were my professor, I would never skip class.” ~ Stephanie Fung, Intermission Magazine

PRESENTATION AND DEVELOPMENT HISTORY:
2024 – live performance – Buddies in Bad Times
2023 – live performance – self-produced at VideoPool’s The Output
2023 – live performance – SummerWorks Festival
2021 – digital performance – London Ontario Media Arts Association, Queer Frontiers series
2021 – development support – Manitoba Association of Playwrights
2020 – development residency – SummerWorks Festival Lab
2020 – development residency – Stratford Festival Lab
2019 – staged reading – Prairie Theatre Exchange Festival of New Works