NYU Abu Dhabi hosted its third annual Global Shakespeare Festival with participants from six different universities in the UAE, Egypt, Lebanon, Singapore and Chile between Nov. 21 and Nov. 25.

The festival began in 2013 as part of an idea to incorporate a Global Shakespeare course into NYUAD’s Literature and Creative Writing curriculum. Since then, the festival has brought over a hundred students from all over the world to Abu Dhabi to take part in four days of master classes, workshops, discussions and performances that reckon with Shakespeare in a global context.

This year the festival was no different, consisting of four jam-packed days of theater and literature workshops and student treatments or interpretations of Shakespeare’s works, followed by reflective discussion sessions among the participants.

Despite midterms and some students having just completed rehearsals of “Organs, Tissues and Candy Games,” NYUAD students put together an original piece that placed Shakespeare in the contemporary context of the Saadiyat campus.

The piece titled “The Isle of Noise” was, according to the program, a “collage exploring questions around what it means to live as guests on foreign soil; how to live up to and inside of an island with an identity and values that are still forming; and how to navigate the tension between personal ambition and the expectations of a community.”

“Those characters and stories were already inside of each and every one of us, in a very real way,” said Freshman Arianna Stucki. “When we study The Tempest, we are not walking through the Tempest. We are realizing that the actual storm is inside us.”

Throughout the workshops, students were given opportunities to discuss the works of Shakespeare, and to reflect on their significance in a global contemporary context.

Some students expressed their appreciation for the global platform facilitated by the festival and commented that the most valuable conversations came from the intersection of differences and similarities they found amongst each other.

"We had the incredible chance to invite a group of Chilean university students with a professor and actor I've had the pleasure to work with for years. The GSF made my worlds collide, quite literally, as students, friends and mentors from Chile collaborated, learned and taught with my friends, mentors and students from NYUAD,” said Global Academic Fellow and NYUAD alumnus Attilio Rigotti.

“I feel extremely lucky and privileged to be part of something that made me feel like I could tower over everything, that I understood all and at the same time feel as tiny and insignificant as the smallest mouse in an infinite world,” said Nanyang Technological University student Syafiq Rafid.