this groundbreaking three-week festival presents six teams of artists exploring and reenvisioning world classics with interactive public events, inviting audiences to witness the evolution of classic narratives and engage in conversations about their relevance today. 

Festival Curator
AeJay Antonis Marquis

Submission Adjudicators
Tierra Allen, Edris Cooper, Ely Sonny Orquiza

Play On Shakespeare is a non-profit company dedicated to promoting and creating contemporary modern English translations of Shakespeare’s plays. Through partnerships with artists and organizations worldwide, Play On Shakespeare delivers these translations via theatrical productions, workshops & trainings, podcasts, publications, and film. Play On Shakespeare is made possible through generous support of the Hitz Foundation. Learn more at playonshakespeare.org.

"If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not, 
Speak then to me.”
— Banquo, Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3

The Seeds of Time Festival takes its name and spirit from Banquo’s haunting call to the future. But we are not looking to divine destiny—we are here to cultivate it. In our inaugural year, as libraries burn and memory is threatened by flame and forgetfulness, we construct new libraries of living voices. We cocoon the archive in our bodies, cooling in the soil, warming toward a radical bloom.

This festival gathers visionary playwrights who dare to replant the theatrical canon. Together, they ask not “What is timeless?” but “Whose time has been refused?”  

We challenge the idea of “the classics” not to destroy, but to disrupt: to compost the idea of Shakespeare as an origin story and fertilize a richer, more unruly field of voices. As Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable—so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” This festival takes that invitation seriously—words become seeds, our stages become soil, and resistance remains tangible.

In a world where dominant narratives threaten to silence and erase diverse futures, Seeds of Time is an act of re-membering. Against the cultural dismemberment that canonization so often enacts—flattening universality into erasure—we echo Shakespeare’s own wrestling with history, inheritance, and possibility. He was not a monument; he was a maker.

We, too, are makers.

Following the call of Suzanne Césaire to be in “permanent readiness for the marvelous,” this festival opens its arms to the strange, the speculative, the sensual, and the subversive. We invite you to dance with us across time, across genre, across the boundary between what is and what could be.

Let these seeds fall wild. Let them grow.

AEJAY ANTONIS MARQUIS(they/them)

Festival Curator: Seeds of Timel

AeJay is a dynamic and visionary performance artist, scholar, educator, and activist with a passion for transforming the theatrical landscape. Their work focuses on decolonizing the theatrical canon, advancing the Black avant-garde, and pioneering queer political performance practices. As a PhD student in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, AeJay’s scholarship delves into performances of prayer and praise as timeless liberatory acts, as well as exploring practices of Black and Queer cultural safety through performance in America.