A Midsummer Night's Dream

"Every Body in Motion" — the inclusive performing arts festival week — is the result of an ongoing process of working with the themes of inclusive arts and the participation of persons with disabilities in theatre and the performing arts. Works diverse in form and approach to the subject will be presented to the public from October 20 to 25.

The works are arranged and introduced to the audience as a journey of searching: beginning with dreams of a fantastical world, joyful with hope for the endurance of humanistic values, troubled and torn by the conflicts of separation and disconnection, quiet with a moment of pause at a crossroads, and ultimately confronting one's own sense of being lost.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is the first stage of that search: a dream of a fantastical world.

Written around 1595, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is one of William Shakespeare's best-loved and most frequently staged comedies. For more than four centuries, his enchanted forest has found its way into music, ballet, opera and film, and theatres around the world keep reinventing it. Its lasting appeal rests on something simple: everyone has loved the wrong person, loved too quickly, or loved so much that they no longer understood themselves.

On a summer night, four young people, in love and hopelessly tangled up with one another, run away into a forest near Athens. They do not know that the forest belongs to the fairies. The Fairy King Oberon is quarrelling with his Queen, Titania, and the mischievous Puck is sent to find a magic flower: a drop of its juice on a sleeper's eyes makes them fall in love with the first creature they see on waking. One drop in the wrong eyes, and the whole forest is thrown off balance. The beloved are suddenly abandoned, the rejected are suddenly adored, and somewhere amid the chase, a group of clumsy craftsmen are rehearsing a play of their own.

In this production, Shakespeare's stage opens to more bodies and more ways of expression. Each actor's difference is not hidden but becomes part of how the story is told. In the words of director Beverly Blankenship, this is a stage where "diversity of body and expression is not a barrier, but a source of creativity."

The production is a collaboration between director Beverly Blankenship and the Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema. The cast brings together students of the Academy and disabled actors invited from outside the school. Throughout the rehearsal process, they have learned to work with one another, listen to one another, and find a shared stage language.