Shakespeare’s Globe Stages Flamenco Love’s Labour’s Lost
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- Indiana Lown-Collins is directing a flamenco reinterpretation of Love’s Labour’s Lost at Shakespeare’s Globe, drawing on her half-Spanish heritage and passion for the dance form’s expressive power.
- Shakespeare’s Globe is hosting daily flamenco bootcamps led by choreographer Carmen Igarza, training non-dancer actors in complex rhythms and movement to align with the play’s language and themes.
- Love’s Labour’s Lost is being reimagined with flamenco to emphasize its themes of passion, love, and repressed desire, using the dance’s visceral energy to counterbalance the play’s wordy, intellectual style.
- Pablo Egea and Anita La Maltesa are the only professional flamenco dancers in the cast, performing alongside actors who have adopted heeled boots that transform their posture and stage presence.
- Michael McMahon and Adrián Solá are composing original flamenco music for the production, performed live on stage with singer Carlos Lobo Cordón, integrating rhythm directly into the delivery of Shakespeare’s rhyming couplets.
Why it matters: This production shifts how Shakespeare is experienced—prioritizing physicality and cultural fusion over textual precision—giving audiences a sensory entry point that challenges British theatrical restraint. The integration of flamenco’s emotional intensity with linguistic complexity creates a new performance language, benefiting actors and audiences seeking embodied storytelling.
