Kim Solga is Professor of Theatre Studies at Western University in London, Canada. Her books include Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance (2009), Performance and the City (2009) and Performance and the Global City (2013), Theatre & Feminism (2015), Theory for Theatre Studies: Space (2019), and Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University: Responses to an Academy in Crisis (2020). As a teacher, Kim is committed to using theatre and performance tools to support knowledge creation, bringing students together across disciplinary lines and encouraging interdisciplinary discoveries. Kim held Western University’s Arts and Humanities Teaching Fellowship from 2021-24, and in 2021 she was awarded Western’s Pleva Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

How do you decolonize a problem like Will Shakespeare – in the classroom, in the theatre? My most recent research explores this now-ubiquitous question by learning from practitioners who identify as women or nonbinary/trans/genderqueer, and who come from historically marginalized communities, especially Indigenous, Black, POC, and different-ability communities. I chronicle process rather than product; I focus on their making practices, rehearsal ethos, and I ask questions about resourcing: what they need from cultural institutions, including academic peers, to continue doing their work (Solga 2024).

At ISTR 2025 I’d like to share one groundbreaking story from this research: that of Reneltta Arluk’s Pawâkan. This adaptation of MacBeth was initiated by a group of high school students almost 10 years ago in the northern Alberta Cree community of Frog Lake, when Reneltta brought her Akpik Theatre Company to town. Demonstrating leadership and pride in their nation, these young people pressed Reneltta for a telling of Shakespeare’s story that foregrounded the Witigo, a powerful hunger spirit from Cree cosmology. Inspired by the students, Arluk went on to script a version of the play based on their telling; it was supported financially by the Stratford Festival of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Stopping here would render Pawâkan a neoliberal and neocolonial success story, but the story of Pawâkan I’ll share at ISTR will instead examine the twists and turns that followed – in which Arluk cannily turned government money and its impact expectations into a means to returned Cree stories to Cree ownership across Treaty 6 territory.  

Shakespeare the poet was crucial to the settler colonial project, and at residential schools across Canada Indigenous youth were forced to shed their cultural histories and adopt his instead. Today, at a moment when the Canadian government is under fire for its failure to meet the 94 calls to action of its 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Arluk’s Pawâkan offers an alternative blueprint for redress that empowers Indigneous students, teachers, and artists to claim Shakespeare’s stories for themselves.

Kim Solga, Women Making Shakespeare in the 21^st Century. Cambridge UP, 2024.