gerotoegl – Global Theatre Histories

12/04/2016

The Journal of Global Theatre History (GTHJ) has published its first issue!

With a focus issue on Theatrical Trade Routes this new, peer-reviewed, open access online journal presents recent research in theatre history devoted to exploring the historical dimensions of theatre and performance from a global, transnational and transcultural perspective. The journal has grown out of a research project conducted at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) entitled Global Theatre Histories: Modernization, public spheres and transnational theatrical networks 1860-1960 (GTH). Sponsored by the German Research Society (DFG) within its Reinhart Koselleck programme for high risk research this six-year project explored the emergence of theatre as a global phenomenon against the background of imperial expansion and modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Journal is issued by the recently established Center for Global Theater History, based at LMU’s Theatre studies department.
The journal for Global Theatre History is published twice a year and welcomes submissions that present original research on theatre, opera, dance, and popular entertainment against the backdrop of globalization studies, transnational and transcultural processes of exchange. We encourage submissions of material covering all historical periods areas, periods, or epochs of all genres of the performing arts, but place special emphasis on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
The journal and more information on submissions, the review process, and future issues can be found at:
https://gthj.ub.lmu.de/

Contact:
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Center for Global Theatre History
Theatre Studies
Georgenstraße 11
80799 Munich
Germany
globaltheatrehistory@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

The Editorial Team
Editors
Christopher Balme and Nic Leonhardt
Editorial Office
Gero Toegl
Gwendolin Lehnerer
Editorial Board
Derek Miller (Harvard), Helen Gilbert (Royal Holloway London)
Stanca Scholz-Cionca (Trier/Munich), Kati Röttger (Amsterdam)
Marlis Schweitzer (York University, Toronto)
Roland Wenzlhuemer (Heidelberg), Gordon Winder (Munich)

15/10/2015

Terror and Performance – A Workshop

a short report by Rashna Nicholson
DFG Research Training Group: “Globalization and Literature. Representations, Transformations, Interventions”, LMU Munich, and associate of the GTH project

On 12 May 2015, Rustom Bharucha, Professor at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and acclaimed writer of Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture,[1] conducted a workshop in Munich based on his most recent work, Terror and Performance.[2] Beginning with his impetus for the writing of his book (one of these being a production of Jean Genet’s The Maids in Manila in 2001), he went on to delineate the starting point of the work: the desire to free ‘terror’ from the language of ‘terrorism’. In this extrapolation of ‘terror’ from ‘terrorism’ he stated the methodological limits of such a view, the chief one being that of literary ‘sprawling’. Nevertheless such a point of view bolstered the ethical rationale in the process of the writing of the text. The second term that need tackling then was that of ‘Performance’ one that he stated was ‘less conditioned by the ‘artistic’ orchestration of a corporeal, ‘live’, rehearsed, time-and-space bound event, framed within the cultural norms of civic institutions like state theatres, than by a much wider understanding (..) inextricably linked to social interactions, behaviours, strategies, deceptions, manipulations, and negotiations of terror in the public sphere.’[3] Through the reclaiming of Judith Butler’s ‘performativity’ within the realm of theatrical praxis, Prof. Bharucha asked for a rethinking of performance as a set of tools to analyze terror. He explained his use of the latter through his clarifications on the ‘queering’ of Muslims as ‘terrorist’ through personal example and through the concept of performativity animating political discourse in the Truth and Reconciliation process in Rwanda and South Africa. Finally as a conclusion he turned to Gandhi’s activist performances in order to question the potency of non-violence in an age of terror. The discussion that took place after the presentation revolved primarily around methodological questions pertaining to the extrapolation of ‘terror’ from ‘terrorism’ and on the constitutive elements of performance. Visual aspects and the assumption of an audience common to both terrorism and performance were highlighted as also the ethics that need be deployed in the writing of terror or terrorism as performance.

[1] Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, London: Routledge, 1993.

[2] Rustom Bharucha, Terror and Performance, London: Routledge, 2014.

[3] Ibid., pp. 19-20.

03/06/2015

Prof. Laurence Senelick (Tufts University, USA) im Juni zu Gast am Institut für Theaterwissenschaft und dem Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) der LMU

Der renommierte amerikanische Theaterwissenschaftler Laurence Senelick wird vom 15. bis 30. 6. 2015 auf gemeinsame Einladung des DFG-Reinhart Koselleck-Projekts Global Theatre Histories der Theaterwissenschaft München und des CAS als Fellow zum Thema “Jacques Offenbach and Modern Culture” forschen. Im Rahmen seines Aufenthalts findet auch ein Vortrag zum Thema

THE OFFENBACH CENTURY: HIS OVERLOOKED INFLUENCE ON MODERN CULTURE

am 16. 6. 2015 um 19 Uhr s. t. am Institut für Theaterwissenschaft statt.

Laurence Senelick ist Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, Fellow der American Academy of Art and Sciences, Distinguished Scholar der American Society for Theatre Research und Träger der St George medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture for contributions to Russian art and culture. Zu seinen zahlreichen Buchveröffentlichungen zählen Gordon Craig’s Moscow Hamlet, The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance, Gender in Performance, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters, und Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History. Prof. Senelick veröffentlichte Übersetzungen mehrerer Klassiker der europäischen Dramatik (unter anderem Gogol, Tschechow, Strindberg, Schiller und Euripides) und arbeitete als Schauspieler und Regisseur an zahlreichen amerikanischen Theatern.

Weitere Informationen zu Prof. Senelick: http://dramadance.tufts.edu/people/senelick.htm