Completing (Public) Spheres: Theatre and the Media in the Baltic States

Abstract

The article deals with two interconnected issues: the issue of theatre interacting with the media and digital network, and the problem of theatre functioning as a public sphere. Both questions are addressed by the analysis of three case studies from contemporary Baltic theatre: two productions of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” staged by Lithuanian director Jonas Vaitkus in 2011 and Latvian director Alvis Hermanis in 2013, and the political project of Estonian theatre NO99, called “Unified Estonia” performed in 2010. The focus of the analyses is not on the dramatic or aesthetic structures of the productions, but on their communication as in all three cases the communication using the media and the network was an important part of the theatrical events. How the theatre producers in the Baltic States approach and deal with mass media and the digital web? What new concepts of the relationship between live physical, placed dialogue and distributed media communication are there in contemporary public sphere? What could be the contribution of the communicative practices of contemporary theatres to the development of democracy and the public sphere? Should theatres offer a radical subversion or rather a critical intervention into the political democracy dominated by electronic, digital or social media? The theoretical background of the analyses is supported by the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, but it also considers the contradictions of this theory as well as its further development in contemporary reflections on the media, social media and the network by Therese F. Tierney, Geert Lovink, Christopher Balme and Luke Goode. The concept of distributed aesthetics is discussed as a proper analytical tool for conceptual analysis of the political projects in contemporary Baltic theatre. The analysis of the three theatre productions in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania point out how local artistic practices through mass media can reach an indefinite number of recipients and inspire further discussions in the places and communities that were usually ignored by traditional routes of theatre communication. The article stresses the possibility and the need for contemporary theatre to shift, intervene, move beyond live experiences, be in more than one place and time in the age when public and democracy does the same.