About the Event
Since our earliest oral traditions emerged, to share a story has often meant to retell it, adapting it to the storyteller's own aims and aesthetics, to the intended audience, and to the prevailing concerns of the surrounding culture. In our own time, retellings, remakes, and adaptations abound, bringing existing tales into the present and reinventing them to the current moment, often to radical ends that would've been impossible for previous tellers of the same tale to imagine.
In this workshop, our speakers will discuss how they approach these retellings and remakes in their own roles as writers and critics: What stories are the ripest for being retold or remade? What makes a retelling or remake necessary in the present? When a writer or filmmaker or other creator sets out to adapt material into a new medium, what opportunities and concerns should they be contemplating? If a story has already been told many times, often for hundreds or even thousands of years, what changes are likely to make it feel fresh to a contemporary audience? Are there pitfalls to retellings and remakes and adaptations that can or should be avoided?
This hybrid event is free and open to the public, in addition to the ASU community. It will be held on the Tempe Campus and simultaneously livestreamed via Zoom, with full participation in the night's activities possible online or in-person.
Our guest lecturers for this event will be ASU's Tanvir Ahmed and Aviva Dove-Viebahn.
About the Worldbuilding Initiative
Hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, the ASU Worldbuilding Initiative invites all members of our community—at ASU and beyond it—to come together in mutual inspiration, communal thinking, and imaginative play. In each of our workshops, audience members will be encouraged to engage in worldbuilding alongside our guest presenters, inventing new ways of imagining and interacting with the world around us.