The Nazi Occupation of Theaterwissenschaft

Theaterwissenschaft was first developed as an academic field in Germany. In Berlin, Max Herrmann pursued a sociological and iconological approach; in Cologne and in Munich, Carl Niessen and Artur Kutscher followed an ethnographic and mythological direction, respectively. With the Nazi takeover in 1933, Herrmann was dismissed and replaced by a non-scholar, Hans Knudsen. Niessen’s open-air Thingspiel was co-opted to support Nazi ideas of Volkstum. Kutscher renounced his liberal background and joined the Party. In Vienna, Josef Gregor got the local Gauleiter to found a Central Institute for Theatre Studies that disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda. The most egregious case is that of Heinz Kindermann, who rose to be the most influential aesthetician of National Socialism, proposing a biological foundation to theatre studies and offering a racial-eugenic approach to theatre history. As this article demonstrates, in the post-war period, theatre studies sedulously avoided dealing with the Nazi interlude, where official denazification permitted these men and others to carry on teaching and publishing, winning honours and titles. It was not until the 1980s that attempts were made to confront this past. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Conference on Transglobal Theatre. His most recent books include Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters (Routledge, 2013); and (with Sergei Ostrovsky) The Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History (Yale University Press, 2014).

This Is England 2021: Staging England and Englishness in Contemporary Theatre

This article explores the ways in which contemporary theatre is engaging with English national questions. In the context of the current devolutionary movements in Britain, I apply a national specificity, focusing on plays and performances which address the politics of just one of the three nations within Britain: England. While this study of the specifics of England and Englishness is already well-established in literary studies (Gardiner) and political science (Kenny; Nairn), there is yet to be a sustained critical engagement with England in theatre studies. Following a discussion of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) in light of its planned West End revival in 2022, I then turn to two recent theatrical representations of England in Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017 and 2020) and the Young Vic’s My England shorts (2019), which I propose offer more rigorous, reflexive explorations into English national identity. As questions over England’s cultural and political representation become increasingly loaded and difficult to navigate, I suggest that the beginnings of this English national register in the theatre marks an attempt to nuance these debates, opening a productive space for critical inquiry.

EXPERIENCE OF READING GABRIELA KLEIN’S BOOK “PINA BAUSCH. THE ART OF TRANSLATION”

This article reviews a book by the German art historian and dance researcher Gabriele Klein, Pina Bausch. The Art of Translation, one of the first monographs on Pina Bausch to be published in Russian (see also the book published by Garage in 2021). The key concept of the book is the praxeology of translation, which addresses not the subject of translation, but the way it is performed. Thus translation is understood in a broad way as the transfer of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre event into the languages of the audience and critics, into other technical media, into other cultural and historical contexts. Particular attention is paid to the mechanisms of this transfer. The author of this book does not analyze the dramatic narrative of dance, as it is common in theatre studies, but explores dance as gesture delivered with the help of the latest technologies.

A Conversation on Directing Opera

Katie Mitchell has been directing opera since 1996, when she debuted on the operatic stage with Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the Welsh National Opera. Since then, she has directed more than twenty-nine operas in major opera houses around the world. Mitchell here speaks of her directorial approach when working with the genre, addressing various aspects of interest for those who want a better grasp of the dynamics of opera-making in the twenty-first century. Ranging from the director’s imprint, or signature on the work they put on the stage, to the relationships forged with people running opera institutions, Mitchell reflects on her experiences when staging opera productions. She sheds light on some fundamental differences between theatre-making and opera production, including the issue of text – the libretto, the dramatic text, and the musical score – and the very basic fact that in opera a director is working with singers, that is, with musicians whose attitude and behaviour on stage is necessarily different from that of actors in the theatre. Running throughout the conversation is Mitchell’s commitment to ensure that young and contemporary audiences do not see opera as a museum artefact but as a living performative experience that resonates with the aesthetics and political imperatives of our contemporary world. She speaks of the uncompromising political imperatives that remain central to her work ethic, even if this means deserting a project before it starts, and reflects on her long-term working relations with opera institutions that are open to new and alternative approaches to opera-making strategies. Mitchell underlines her respect for the specific rules of an art form that, because of its collaborative nature, must allow more space for theatre-makers to venture within its complex performative paths if it wants to secure a place in the future. Mario Frendo is Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is the director of CaP, a research group focusing on the links between culture and performance.

Making the Representation Real: The Actor and the Spectator in Milo Rau’s ‘Theatrical Essays’ Mitleid and La Reprise

Exceptional in demonstrating the political engagement emerging in twenty-first-century performance is the corpus of the writer and director Milo Rau, whose practice is distinguished by its (re)meditation of the real. With detailed reference to Mitleid (2016) and La Reprise (2018), this article examines Rau’s self-reflexive strategies in (re)presenting testimony or an event as a means not of depicting the real, but of making the theatrical representation itself real in order to change the world rather than merely to portray it. The article focuses in particular on strategies relating to the actor-character and spectatorship. Rau’s interest in the positions of the actor and spectator illuminates issues that have arisen in the discourse of theatre witnessing and in recent scholarship on dramaturgical approaches and spectatorship in contemporary political performance. Essentially, Rau makes the performer’s habitus transparent, and challenges the spectator’s reflexivity, effectively rebutting the largely unchallenged assumption that characters who perform witnesses necessarily leave little room for the spectator to be a performing witness. Stuart Young is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Otago. His recent publications include the co-edited Ethical Exchanges: Translation, Adaptation, Dramaturgy (Brill Rodopi, 2017), while his practice-led research into Theatre of the Real includes The Keys are in the Margarine: A Verbatim Play about Dementia (2014).

Hvordan gjøre scenekunst med teatervitenskap

This article is based on a lecture presented on the 25th of May 2018 at the conference Teatervitenskap – historiografi, teori og praksis in Bergen. This conference’s objective was to defend the section of Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen against cuts, and the lecture’s corresponding objective was to exemplify how theatre studies, besides consisting in research on performing arts, also is productively effective in creative processes of performing arts respectively in this field’s artistic research. In relation to the conference’s three focal points – historiography, theory, and practice – referred the lecture to three examples: Mette Ingvartsen’s performance 69 positions from 2014, Iggy Malmborg’s performance b o n e r, also from 2014, and the author’s own work as theatre scholar with background in Applied Theatre Studies, particularly his collaboration as dramaturge with Heine Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki / fieldworks in their productions distant voices (2014), carry on (2015) and unannounced (2017). The article presents these examples in a slightly changed order and adds, as their description’s background, a discussion on, firstly, the arguments that were used to defend theatre studies in the conference’s context, and, secondly, the relation between research and artistic research in Norway and the debate about it.

The Theatre of Purgation and the Theatre of Cultivation

In China, theatre studies has been dominated by Western discourse on serious drama, mostly the theatre of purgation. It is equally important, however, to study popular Western theatre genres, such as musicals, comedies, and relatively uplifting plays, especially in terms of their similarities with Chinese opera—an epitome of theatre of cultivation.