Marc Pagan’s video project “Scenes from the Tempest” offers a thoughtful — and beautiful — interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. By limiting himself to visual rather than textual cues, he is able to explore how visual symbols can tell a story effectively. These symbols include the horse mask worn by Caliban: the horse-face retains Shakespeare’s association between Caliban and the natural or bestial world, but by using a mass-produced rubber mask, Pagan shows how this association has been manufactured by humans and obscures his true face. Additionally, a water-logged iPhone becomes a symbol of Caliban’s power to give Miranda access to information, while a set of earbuds symbolizes the language that Miranda gives to Caliban. Read Pagan’s reflection here.

In “The New York Tempest,” Akash Kumar takes Shakespeare’s emphasis on illusion, stagecraft, and control, and explores these themes in a modern setting. By casting the noblemen as film executives and the slaves as assistants, this play offers a subtle critique of the labor practices in the film industry. The final image reveals Prospero as a tragic character who cannot escape from the world he created. Kumar deftly transforms the audience’s relationship to the fourth wall in the final lines: while Shakespeare’s Prospero makes us aware of the play as a play by addressing the audience directly, Kumar’s Prospero makes us aware of the play as a play by demonstrating his own inability to distinguish between illusion and reality. Like Césaire, Kumar gives us a Prospero who cannot be freed from his own delusions. Read Kumar’s reflection here.

In this abstract expressionist painting, A. K. Evans borrows the “zip” from Barnett Newman’s Onement series in order to call attention to the doubling or duality of characters in both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Aimée Césaire’s A Tempest. A tree-like line bisects a field of blue (perhaps a clear sky, or perhaps another reference to Newman’s work), while uneven ovals of yellow ochre and raw umber, reminiscent of standing men, face off across the divide. Both colors, however, are supported by the dark stripe at the bottom of the painting, which could be representative of stormy water, or the island, or the uncertain line of the horizon, where an optical illusion appears to erase the distinction between land, sea, and sky. The visual symmetry between the roots and the branches and between “Caliban” and “Ariel” implies a deep connection across difference not only for Caliban and Ariel, but also for colonizer and colonized. These dualities, Evans’s painting implies, coexist with unities of system. Read Evans’s reflection here.

“Prospero vs. Caliban,” a rap battle between Neil Koshy and Rahul Soni, explores the exaggerated antipathy between Prospero and Caliban while commenting on the importance of performativity in The Tempest itself. The two raps draw on both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel, which uses the characters from The Tempest to argue for a Eurocentric Latin American aesthetic distinct from the dominating culture of the United States.

Koshy begin’s by portraying Rodó’s Prospero arguing for a “new era/ Where values are fixed on true beauty and education.” Kokshy allows this preoccupation with aesthetics to guide the insults Prospero directs at Caliban and the U.S. The final couplet, which rhymes “power” with “shower,” reiterates the central claim of Koshy’s implicit argument: that Rodó’s fixation on aesthetics (a shower) veils a deeper concern for the aesthetics of power.

Soni responds with careful attention to Caliban’s speech. Of course by making Caliban an actor in a rap battle, Soni gives him agency and a voice that is largely denied in The Tempest and to some extent recuperated in Aimée Césaire’s A Tempest. Soni’s Caliban turns Prospero’s words back on him— he may be called “ugly,” but he reclaims the power to define himself through his “beautiful speech.” At the conclusion, a throwaway connection to “alternative facts” and the Trump administration offers commentary on power dynamics of the current political climate, as well as on the power (or magic) of speech to shape reality. Finally, by claiming victory for Caliban in the rap battle and denying Prospero the audience’s “release,” this project, like A Tempest, literally gives Caliban the final word, demonstrating his ultimate power over Prospero, the shape of his narrative, and us as the audience.

Watch the live performance here.

Aisha Zaraei’s series of three poems shows an unusual degree of sympathy and compassion for the characters in The Tempest. Normally when we produce literary scholarship, we end up treating all the characters as symbols, allegories, or figures for larger concepts about human nature, social structures, and world historical forces. By choosing to respond to the play in a series of first-person-narrated poems, rather than in a traditional scholarly essay, Zaraei is able to retain the characters’ humanity. This form also allows her to give each of the three characters an equal voice, subtly shifting the focus of this project toward the more marginalized characters as Miranda and Caliban are able to address the audience directly, a privilege Shakespeare reserves for Prospero. Each poem takes as its focus the emotional motivations of the characters, and in “Caliban’s Cry” Zaraei subtly indicates how similar their motivations are when we focus on that emotional element: Caliban, like Miranda, “dreams” of another life; Caliban, like Prospero, is “plotting” his revenge. Read Zaraei’s reflection here.

Wade Li’s “Just Another Tempest” uses a light touch to interpret The Tempest. In some places, the alterations (beyond the modernized language) are so subtle as to be nearly imperceptible. But Li’s decision to update the language in itself directs the reader’s attention to the importance of language generally in the play and in his interpretation. Li has Ariel speak entirely in the active voice, which shifts his relationship both to Prospero and to the way he carries out Prospero’s orders: he becomes visibly (or audibly) complicit in Prospero’s machinations. Caliban, on the other hand, uses language as a tool of resistance — as when he mutters over his shoulder, “Elohssa ko.” While Li leaves the symbolism of Caliban’s backward-speaking “native language” up for interpretation, it suggests the way “developed” nations treat “developing” nations as “backward,” while leaving open the possibility that Caliban’s language might have the power to undo or reverse the violence done by Prospero’s language.

In this painting, Salma Abouhasswa, Saad Khakwani, Aimen Khan, and Davinder Singh visually portray a scene from a reimagined version of The Tempest. The group draws on the work of with Rodó, Retamar, and Césaire—three interpretations of The Tempest that re- center the marginal and marginalized characters in Shakespeare’s play—in order to show, as Abouhasswa put it, “the power dynamics between characters that have little to no power over the people above them.” The painting focuses on Alonso, Gonzalo, Caliban, Ferdinand, and Miranda, giving each of these characters a new constellation of motives and providing an opportunity to interrogate the nature of the power dynamics in The Tempest and what forces uphold them—whether it’s the individual personalities or an ingrained social system of arbitrary hierarchies. The painting itself, as Khakwani points out, uses perspective, distance, relative size, and eye contact to indicate the power dynamics outlined in the artists’ reflections.

By using a song as a medium to interpret The Tempest, Naveen Singh’s “Thought of You” highlights the importance of treating the play as a performance. The lyrics read as a plaintive monologue that allows Caliban the opportunity to express himself more fully. Through song, Singh reveal aspects of Caliban’s psyche that are not immediately apparent in other interpretations. While there are elements of Césaire’s Caliban in the line, “Boy you know I’ve got freedom…You can’t do shit cuz now I’m free,” Singh’s Caliban expresses a complex relationship to both Prospero and to his freedom. By choosing a love song to express hate, Singh draws our attention to the obsessively intimate focus of both emotions. The relationship between Caliban and Prospero comes to resemble that between spouses in an abusive relationship; this song offers not only a new interpretation of The Tempest, but also a cutting commentary on the violent love glorified in some contemporary pop music.

Watch the live performance here.