Poetry Performance: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” (SF Main Library)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Actress Angelina Llongeras, under the direction of Jiwon Chung, performs a dramatic reading of The Masque of Anarchy, a stirring poetic celebration of nonviolent resistance by the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The performance is 25-minutes long and will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A. 

The Masque of Anarchy is considered one of the best political poems in the English language. Written on the occasion of the massacre carried out by the British Government at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819, Shelley begins his poem with powerful, surreal images of the unjust forms of authority of his time–“God, and King, and Law”–and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action: “Let a great assembly be, of the fearless, of the free.” The crowd in the poem’s gathering is met by armed soldiers, but the protestors do not raise an arm against their assailants… 

Angelina Llongueras is an actress, playwright and stage director. She was the lead actress in Metamorfosis by La Fura dels Baus in its 2-year international tour.  She performed her own one-woman show, Phoolan is Everyone, in the Women Playwrights International Conference in Stockholm, in the Bogotá and Cali Theatre Festivals in Colombia, and at the Darpana Academy in Ahmedabad, India. Phoolan has also been presented in important theatres throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. 

Llongueras has performed The Mask of Anarchy at the Printer’s Row Literary Festival, the Abbie Hoffmann Theatre Festival and De Paul University in Chicago, at the Sala  Fenix in Barcelona, and at the Sabarmati Ashram and Kerala Cultural Center in Ahmedabad, India. As a film and TV actress she has worked with director Pedro Almodóvar, actor Javier Bardem and many other notables. 

As a playwright, Llongueras has won awards in Barcelona and New York for her plays El Cobert (“The Junk Room”) and Lo Mein and Tequila. 

As theater director, Llongueras has directed Benedetti’s Pedro and the Captain, Shakespeare’s Richard II, Friedrich ‘s Dürrenmatt The Physicists and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. 

Jiwon Chung is the artistic director of Kairos Theater Ensemble and adjunct professor at the Starr King School at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, where he teaches Theater and Social Justice. His work uses theater as a tool for social and political change, as a means to challenge, resist and transform systemic oppression and structural violence, and to redress large scale historical atrocity and global injustice. Chung also works locally on the creation of wrap-around behavioral health care systems for underserved immigrant communities and refugee populations in the Bay Area. His approach to individual, interpersonal and institutional change is informed by his three decades of vipassana meditation, and his background as a martial artist and veteran. 

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Angelina Llongeras – IMDb 

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