In May 2019 in an event organized by Dr Vinicius de Carvalho, the King's Brazil Ensemble performed a series of songs based on Shakespeare's texts, in translation. The repertoire consisted of Four sonnets in Portuguese translation, composed by Harry Crowl and sung by the Sopranp Gabriella di Laccio, the 'Three Songs from W Shakespeare' by Igor Stavinsky, and the 'Three Shakespeare Songs' by Vaughan Williams.
Through interactions with the audience, the performance explored how 'cultural anthropophagy', the idea that subaltern countries can 'cannibalize' other cultures and out of this create new forms of expression, is enacted when poetry is translated into other languages including music.The concept of 'cultural anthropophagy' was first imagined by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropófago (1928) and subsequently taken up by post- and de-colonial theory.
The evening celebrated the publication of de Carvalho's new book, co-edited with Dr. Anne Sophie Refskou and Dr. Marcel Amorim, Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology (Bloomsbury, 2019).