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Keynote «Mediating Cultural Meanders: Dance, Narration, Music» Gannat, France, 25-28 July, 2019

Nic Leonhardt, Director of the Centre of GTH, has been invited as a keynote speaker of the conference Indigenous Languages, Traditional Music and Dance within an Intercultural Performance/ Langues autochtones, musiques et danses traditionelles au sein de performances interculturelles in Gannat (Auvergne, France). The conference, organized by Vikrant Kishore (Australia) and Etienne Rougier (France) takes place along with the Festival des Cultures du Monde, which is a part of UNESCO‘s intangible cultural heritage. Gannat is famous for the festival that takes place every summer since 1974. The conference will be the first of its time.

Nic Leonhardt’s tal “Mediating Cultural Meanders: Dance, Narration, Music” will discuss the circulation of intangible cultural phenomena using the examples of Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun and his performance “Nijinsky Siam” as well as the figure and stories of Mullah/Hodja Nasreddin.

New Publication: Theater über Ozeane. Vermittler transatlantischen Austauschs (1890-1925) by Nic Leonhardt

The latest monograph by Nic Leonhardt, director of the Centre for Global Theatre History @LMU Munich, Theater über Ozeane. Vermittler transatlantischen Austauschs (1890-1925) (in German), was published recently. The book is about the history of theatre business and follows the professional itineraries and business strategies of hitherto unknown theatrical agents, playbrokers and producers (among them Alice Kauser, Elizabeth Marbury, Richard Pitrot and H. B. Marinelli) who handled the transatlantic showbiz. Theater über Ozeane enters the infrastructural „backstage area“ of global and cultural mobility in the late 19th and early 20th century, and is based on a rich body of primary sources from archives in the United States and Europe. 

The book will be officially launched on Wednesday, 12 December, 6.30pm, at IBZ Munich, Amalienstraße  38

Nic Leonhardt: Theater über Ozeane. Vermittler transatlantischen Austauschs (1890-1925). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018 (341 pages, 38 illustrations; hard cop ISBN 978-3-8471-0805-4. Info and Order here.



 

“Iste – Ille. Here and There”. Keynote by Nic Leonhardt on Global Theatre Histories (Stockholm, 22-24 Nov, 2018)

Nic Leonhardt, Director of the Centre for Global Theatre Histories, has been invited as a keynote speaker to the symposium “From Local to Global: Interrogating Performance Histories”. The symposium is organized by the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, University of Stockholm, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, and will take place at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

In her talk, entitled Iste-Ille. Here and There. What and Where is Europe in a Global History of Theatre?, she will introduce into ways and methodological challenges of writing the history/ histories of the performing arts from a transnational and global perspective.

Sharon Lehner, Guest of GTHC, on Emerging Performance Archives (13 June, 12-1:30pm)

On Wednesday, 13 June, Sharon Lehner (Brooklyn, New York), currently guest of the Centre for Global Theatre Histories, will be talking about her work at the HAMM Archives of the Brooklyn Academy for Music in Brooklyn (BAM), N.Y.

Her talk, Emerging Performance Archives, is taking place in the context of the colloquium of the Department of Theatre Studies (TWM) at LMU Munich

Time: Wednesday, 13 June, from 12 (sharp) to 1:30pm.

Venue: room #109, Theatre Studies Munich, Georgenstrasse 11, 80799 Munich

The event is open to the public. Registration is not required.

Abstract

Performance is an ephemeral, impermanent experience. It is also typically collaborative, formed from a web of people, their relationships and ideas. Collecting and describing performance is fundamentally different from describing a physical object. That static repository model– archives as dusty, 19th century curio cabinet–has been replaced by a more contemporary living archive. A recent Google search for “Living Archive” brought up many thousands of hits. The term, appropriated by numerous disciplines, describes everything from open data projects in computer science programs to Asian Art Museums. While the use of the term Living Archive is applied differently across these projects, all seem to crave live-ness and who understands this better than those who create performance? Performance archives mirror the collaborative process they describe, creating webs of knowledge that can be connected back to the original event. Archiving performance is also practical, working with a dizzying array of media to collect, organize, describe, preserve, and make available objects related to performances, history, and people. We work with creators, performers, designers, photographers, videographers, subject area specialists, and numerous others. The process is open and creative, with discussion about how best to document and share work. Performing artists already understand the limits of representation and the power of embodied experience. In performance archives we attempt to reflect the complexity.

Biographical Note

Sharon Lehner has directed the BAM Hamm Archives in Brooklyn, New York since 1999. She holds degrees in Performance Studies and also in Historical Editing and Archival Management from New York University and has presented at conferences and published in both disciplines. She has served as a consultant to performance archives and acted as advisor to the Pina Bausch Archives from 2009-2017.  Recent projects include the launch of The Leon Levy BAM Digital Archive, an encyclopedic resource documenting the history of BAM, In Terms of Performance at BAM, Co-produced by BAM, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and UC Berkeley, an interactive installation exploring the terms that describe contemporary art and performance. Most recent publications include How to Create an Archive? Inheriting Dance: An Invitation from Pina ([transcript] Press, Verlag 2014) Forthcoming, BAM: The Next Wave Festival edited by Susan Yung and Steven Serafin and interview in the Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities in Theatre and Performance edited by Dr. Nic Leonhardt

 

 

Conference “Philanthropy, Development and the Arts” (23-25 July): preliminary programme online

From 23–25 July, the ERC project Developing Theatre will hold its first international conference at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung. International scholars of disciplines such as international relations, art studies, performance studies, and history as well as representatives of foundations and museums will gather in Munich for discussing Philanthropy, Development and the Arts: Histories and Theories.

The preliminary programme can be accessed here.

 

 

Keynote Lectures (open to the public, registration mandatory):

Monday, 23 July, 6pm: Volker Berghahn (Columbia University New York): American Foundations, the Arts, and High Politics, 1898-2018

Tuesday, 24 July, 11am: Inderjeet Parmar (London): Foundations of the US-led Liberal International Order: From the ‘Rise to Globalism’ to ‘America First’

Registration: We cordially welcome external guests to attend the conference and/ or the keynote lectures. Please note: registration is mandatory due to the house rules of the Siemens Stiftung. If you would like to register, please send an e-mail indicating your name, e-mail address, affiliation, and if you would like to register for the entire conference and/ or the keynote lectures, to project assistant Gwendolin Lehnerer (MA):  gwendolinlehnerer@yahoo.com

For regular updates on the conference, please also consult the Conference Website .

 

new series: A Cultural History of Theatre (ed. C. B. Balme & T. C. Davis), Bloomsbury

Edited by Tracy C. Davis and Christopher B. Balme, this new Cultural History of Theatre series offers an insightful survey from ancient times (500 BCE) to the present. The set of six volumes covers a span of 2,500 years, tracing the complexity of the interactions between theatre and culture.
Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters, namely Institutional Frameworks,  Social Functions, Sexuality and Gender, The Environment of Theatre, Circulation, Interpretations, Communities of Production, Repertoire and Genres, Technologies of Performance, and Knowledge Transmission: Media and Memory.

Volume 1: A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity (Edited by Martin Revermann)
Volume 2: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages (Edited by Jody Enders)
Volume 3: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age (Edited by Robert Henke)
Volume 4: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment (Edited by Mechele Leon)
Volume 5: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire (Edited by Peter Marx)
Volume 6: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age (Edited by Kim Solga)

Five GTH Centre members contributed to volume 5, A Cultural History of theatre in the Age of Empire: Jim Davis, Nic Leonhardt, Derek Miller, Stanca Scholz-Cionca, and Laurence Senelick.

New Article Out Now: Theatrical Institutions in Motion (C. Balme)

The first peer-reviewed publication of the new ERC project “Developing Theatre: Building Expert Networks for Theatre in Emerging Countries after 1945” just came out in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (vol. 31, 2, 2017).

In his paper “Theatrical Institutions in Motion: Developing Theatre in the Postcolonial Era” the project’s principal investigator Christopher Balme examines the complex transnational processes that led to an institutionalization of theatre in emerging nations after 1945.

Christopher Balme: “Theatrical Institutions in Motion: Developing Theatre in the Postcolonial Era”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 31, no. 2, 2017, pp. 125–140.

Article available on Project MUSE.

 

IFTR 2017 in São Paulo – Annual Conference

Since 1957, the year of founding of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), theatre scholars and IFTR members from all parts of the world (in fact from 44 different countries!) meet for their annual conference.

Both the conference theme and the location vary from year to year. The IFTR 2017 conference has a focus on Unstable Geographies: Multiple Theatricalities, and will be hosted by the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Five associates and researchers of the Centre for Global Theatre Histories and the ERC project Developing Theatre will be attending #IFTR2017 and present papers on their current topics of research:

Christopher Balme: Theatrical modernism for the world: Theatrical Epistemic Communities 1920-1960.

Gautam Chakrabarti: The Red Bear has Awoken!: Soviet Engagement with Indian Theatre Artists in the Cold War.

Nic Leonhardt: “… Enlarging the Boundaries of Human Knowledge“– by Means of Theatre: Multiple Theatricalities and the Philanthropic Agenda of Stabilizing Cultural Geographies after 1945.

Rashna Darius NicholsonWhat’s in a name? The role of language in the invention of colonial and postcolonial South Asian theatre history

Azadeh SharifiDis/Continuity of Post-migrant theatre in Germany theatre history.

 

Public Talk: Theatre in Occupied Berlin and Vienna, 1945-1948

theater1Public talk by Rebecca Rovit (University of Kansas, Fulbright Fellow IFK Wien) Organized by the Centre for Global Theatre Histories.

30 November, 2016, 12-2pm. Theaterwissenschaft, Georgenstrasse 11, 80796 Muenchen, room #109.

“Cultural historians have not sufficiently analyzed how theatre directors and performers coordinated artistic endeavors in the years before Soviet and Western-Allied powers set parameters for cultural life in postwar Berlin. The re-emergent culture after 1945 arose from an artistic collaboration between German-language artists and military officers from four zones of foreign occupation. Evidence suggests that before a German defeat was inevitable, Soviet leaders and exiled artists planned a future cultural policy for Germany and Austria. Officers in the occupied zones recognized the political power of culture and subsidized theatre. Artists knew that the theatre could be a useful conduit to bring recent history to the public. What does this suggest about the theatre repertoire in Vienna, another city, defeated and managed by four world powers? This lecture will explore the interplay of forces that defined the cultural heritage of the occupation in the early postwar years, while tapping into historiographical, national narratives of Germany and Austria.”

 

Developing Theatre after 1945 – Lecture by Christopher Balme @ Uni Heidelberg

Tglobalgeschichte_vortragsreihe-uni-heidelberghe Department of History at Heidelberg University has invited Christopher Balme to speak about his new ERC project Developing Theatre as part of the department’s lecture series on Global History.

The lecture entitled Developing Theatre: Building Expert Networks for Theatre in Emerging Countries after 1945 will take place on Thursday, 19 January, 2017, 6pm. (Historisches Seminar, Grabengasse 3-5, Hörsaal, Heidelberg).

The new ERC project started recently at LMU Munich. For the next 5 years, an international team of researchers will be working on strategies and politics of developing theatre after the World War II. More on this new avenue of writing Global Theatre Histories will be published shortly!

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 & bharucha_webAesthetics, 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.