Theatre Institute Research Articles

Європейські моделі фінансування культурних проєктів

The article considers fundraising practices in the cultural space of European countries and the possibility of their adaptation to modern Ukrainian conditions, which is extremely relevant today. Despite the emergence of systematic practice and the theory of fundraising in the American cultural context, it is the European experience that forUkraineis extremely relevant. After all, the US practice is aimed at financing culture from mostly private sources without public funds, while the European experience of fundraising has developed in a significant (albeit different and variably organized in some countries) public funding. We are talking about various forms of combining state and borrowed funds, which is more in line with domestic traditions of financing culture. The article is based on: theoretical developments in the field of fundraising; analysis of open sources on European and Ukrainian experience of fundraising in the field of culture, theater practice; analysis of modern Ukrainian theatrical practice. The authors of the article note that in the current conditions for cultural organizations as non-profit there are tasks of finding different sources of funding, diversification of their activities. These tasks are extremely acute for state cultural institutions. At the same time, the current management mechanisms in the field of culture do not always meet current needs. These factors, as well asUkraine's desire to be organically involved in modern European cultural processes, stimulates increased attention to the world experience of organization and financing in the cultural sphere. In this context, today the strategy of fundraising is becoming increasingly popular as a specific method of finding sources of funding, activities to attract and accumulate external sources. It is important that in the field of culture fundraising is aimed at financial and material support of the creative process, as well as to perform certain social tasks, such as conducting cultural and educational work; study, preservation and protection of museum collections, architectural monuments, etc. The article emphasizes that for the theatrical space these are additional opportunities for propaganda among the widest general public of theatrical art as such, organization of special actions, conferences, festivals by theatrical institutions, stimulation of topical avant-garde art experiments. Therefore, the consideration of fundraising practices of European countries in the cultural space and the possibility of its adaptation to modern Ukrainian conditions seems to be extremely relevant. The problems and issues addressed by the authors of the article allow to state the urgent need for thorough art, cultural, practical research, devoted to a comprehensive analysis, the statement of foreign and domestic experience of fundraising in the performing arts.

THE INSTITUTIONAL PERSONA: WHEN THEATRES BECOME PERSONAS AND THE CASE OF BRISTOL OLD VIC

This article proposes a definition and terminology for identifying and analysing a concept of institutional persona in relation to theatre. The essay posits the theatre institution as an example of a ‘composite persona’, whereby cultural value is produced through the interplay between theatre as building, theatre as organisation, and theatre as event. Using the case-study of Bristol Old Vic, I examine how executives and practitioners involved in a specific historic theatre ensured its post-war survival in the 1940s by connecting the prestigious heritage of a local landmark with the national reputation of two London-based organisations. I suggest that theatre institutions offer a particularly rich investigative ground for the application of persona study theory in their need to mobilise individual and organisational personas for the purposes of reinventing a ‘good story’ and brand over time.

The shape of theatre in the city: A theoretical and methodological approach for analyzing artistic activity in urban space

ABSTRACT This article explores the spatial and social relationship between theatre and the city through the case study of Acre, a mixed peripheral city in Israel. Despite the numerous studies dealing with artistic activity in the city, we still lack a clear, systematic method for understanding art’s role in urban space. This study attempts to overcome this lacuna by suggesting an analytical method for understanding the socio-spatial relations between theatre and the urban space in which it is practiced. The method is based on a juxtaposition of the city’s physical and social structure with the artistic activity of five theatre institutions, and uses super-positioning to combine two research methods: urban research and ethnographic fieldwork. By mapping the artistic activity, it gives shape to an abstract social phenomenon, therefore enabling its spatial analysis. The findings were analyzed according to four spatial categories: enclosure, centrality, axiality, and permeability. In the case study we explored, the artistic activity shape was limited by the city’s physical and social structure and had little effect on its immediate urban surroundings. We nonetheless emphasize the applicability of this methodology to other cities and other fields of art that could produce different shapes and lead to different outcomes.

Culturally Competent and Trauma-Informed Teaching in the Age of MAGA and Brexit

Culturally Competent and Trauma-Informed Teaching in the Age of MAGA and Brexit Sylvan Baker (bio), Stephen Buescher (bio), and Kaja Dunn (bio) The prompt for the following conversation originated in a session at the ATHE conference in Orlando that centered around teaching culturally competent pedagogy in the age of Make America Great Again (MAGA) and Brexit. This piece is a recording of a curated discussion among the three scholars from that panel, which took place on Skype across three time zones. In the wake of massive political transition in both the United States and the United Kingdom, we discuss what it means to have a culturally responsive, culturally competent curriculum on both sides of the pond (figs. 1–2). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Sylvan Baker (top), Stephen Buescher, and Kaja Dunn on Skype. [End Page E-29] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Stephen Buescher, Kaja Dunn, and Sylvan Baker (l-r) at the 2019 ATHE conference in Orlando, Florida. How do we start/continue to push forward ideas of equity, inclusion, and decolonization in our actor-training programs, while also dealing with a changing political climate and the increasingly partisan grouping of issues around race, ethnicity, and culture? This piece considers effective ways of changing both curriculum and culture on campus. Looking at practice and culture in BA, BFA, and MFA programs, the panel explores the barriers and strategies to implementing change in academia and advocating for the theatre world that students will enter. Drawing on critical race theory, decolonizing methodologies, and sociological and psychological research, the panel also looks at the unique barriers affecting faculty of color in theatre institutions that are working to implement change. To view the video, click here: https://www.jhuptheatre.org/theatre-topics/online-content/issue/volume-30-number-1-march-2020/culturally-competent-and-trauma. [End Page E-30] Sylvan Baker Sylvan Baker is a researcher, practitioner, and lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He has experience in a range of applied arts contexts. He is an Artist Fellow at QMUL and an Education Fellow for the UK’s Royal Society of Arts. His research enables individuals to explore social issues through diverse artistic practices. His current projects are working with young people with experience of care and practice aimed at disrupting racial exclusion for students and staff members in higher education. He was elected a member at large of the Black Theatre Association for ATHE. Stephen Buescher Stephen Buescher is a teacher, choreographer, director, and actor. He is a professor of movement at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and has taught or created curricula in various graduate acting programs, including the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), Dell’Arte, Yale and Brown universities, University of Missouri–Kansas City, and University of Connecticut. He has choreographed at theatres including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, A.C.T., Old Globe, Long Wharf, and Trinity Repertory Company, and has directed in the graduate acting programs at A.C.T. and UCSD. He has performed nationally and internationally with Dell’Arte International for over a decade, and is a graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater and Calarts. Kaja Dunn Kaja Dunn is an assistant professor and head of acting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as well as a director, actor, and activist. She has presented her work on Training Theatre Students of Color at Goldsmiths, University of London, Southeastern Theatre Conference, Black Theatre Network, Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, and ATHE, among other places. She is on the national board of the Black Theatre Association, and has performed in over forty shows and taught and performed internationally. She was previously a lecturer at California State University San Marcos and toured with Ya Tong Theatre in Taiwan. Other teaching credits include working with homeless and foster youth in San Diego. Follow her on Twitter where she frequently posts about EDI issues under the handle @KajaDunn. Copyright © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press

Rāmāyaṇa Saṁkṣepaṁ: An Āṭṭaprakāraṁ (Acting Manual) for Depicting the Story of Rāmāyaṇa Through Mudrās in Kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ Theatre by G. Irinjalakuda Venu

Reviewed by: Rāmāyaṇa Saṁkṣepaṁ: An Āṭṭaprakāraṁ (Acting Manual) for Depicting the Story of Rāmāyaṇa Through Mudrās in Kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ Theatre by G. Irinjalakuda Venu Phillip Zarrilli RĀMĀYAṆA SAṀKṢEPAṀ: AN ĀṬṬAPRAKĀRAṀ (ACTING MANUAL) FOR DEPICTING THE STORY OF RĀMĀYAṆA THROUGH MUDRĀS IN KŪṬ IYĀṬṬAṀ THEATRE. By G. Irinjalakuda Venu. Kerala: Natana Kairali, 2013. 324 pp., with 2 DVDs. Cloth, INR 1000. This remarkable publication by G. Venu is an invaluable, highly accessible, beautifully produced print and audio-visual resource for understanding and appreciating the three-dimensional embodied process of acting and training actors within the kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ tradition of performing Sanskrit dramas in Kerala. The publication includes an introduction to kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ; bilingual translation (Malayalam/English) of the acting manual; along with an audio-visual publication of this specific manual for teaching acting within the kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ tradition in the form of photographs; and two exquisitely produced accompanying DVDs with close-up camera work featuring Kapila Venu as she performs the entire text over a period of three hours and twenty-three minutes. The printed text includes a series of five short chapters. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction of the kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ theatre while chapter 2 contextualizes and introduces the acting manual. The third chapter provides an introduction to the Rāmāyaṇa performance within kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ that has been assembled from three different Sanskrit dramas. Chapter 4 introduces the production manual which informs the staging andacting of the Rāmāyaṇa text; chapter 5 introduces the acting manual per se and how it is used in teaching. A bilingual Malayalam/English translation of the text allows the reader to have a sense of the text as a whole. There is also a complete Malayalam script version of the acting manual, with notation of each specific hand gesture used to deliver the text, linked by number to Venu G.'s system of notation for each gesture, incorporating documentation of hand positions, movement of the eyes, etc. As laid out below, the ninth chapter provides a complete bilingual (Romanized) version of the text, with both a literal and a more fluid translation in English. Venu G. is a kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ performer and teacher who trained for thirty years under the guidance of Guru Ammannur Madhava Chakyar—one of the great masters of kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ. He is the founding [End Page 293] director of Natanakairali (from 1975)—a cultural organization located in Irinjalakuda, Kerala, India, and devoted to the revitalization of the traditional arts of Kerala via training, research, and performance. Venu G. is a widely published author and has developed a unique system for annotation of the hand gestures of kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ. As well as training kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ actors, Venu G. also works with contemporary actors sharing his in-depth understanding of kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ with acting students at the Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI) (Singapore), the National School of Drama (NSD) (New Delhi), and in workshops at Natanakairali. As Venu G. notes in his acknowledgments, while teaching the acting techniques of kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ to students at ITI and NSD it occurred to him how important it would be to have Rāmāyaṇa Saṁkṣepaṁ available "so that the students would be able to grasp the meaning of the mudras easily" (p. vii). For anyone wishing to understand kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ's threedimensional practice of embodying/enacting a text, this is an essential resource. As a text for training young kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ actors, the fact that Rāmāyaṇa Saṁkṣepaṁ is written in the local language of Malayalam rather than Sanskrit is crucial. As Venu G. explains the "mother tongue … is as vital as oxygen" (p. 51): "Only the mother tongue goes in your imagination. It's like the breath of each human being. Through that if you think about the associations, so many things come with each word of the acting manual" (Introduction to DVD1). The first of two DVDs that accompany the publication begins with a twelve minute...

Strategies to Stimulate the Economy of Contemporary Nepali Theatre

The contemporary Nepali theatre has stood at the crossroads at various junctures in time. Theatre institutions have frequently struggled for survival, primarily due to the inflating financial pressures and myopic strategic focus. For several of them, it has consequentially led them to complete shutdown. A gradually growing audience base hasn't been able to fully assure sustenance to the industry stakeholders. With such impending uncertainty hovering over the industry, theatre companies in Nepal are challenged to profitably sustain in the burgeoning entertainment industry. Sensing the imminent necessities, this paper introduces an interdisciplinary intervention by providing proven roadmaps for contemporary theatre players in Nepal. All of these strategies are derived and tailored from the domains of business and marketing. More specifically, the crux is fixated around the marketing mix model, devised by Neil Borden in the 1950s. Extracting pivotal arguments and findings from a variety of researches and studies conducted all around the world, the paper in hand attempts to synchronize conceptual underpinnings of the theories with pragmatic contexts of modern-day Nepali theatre. And before providing potential solutions, the author has also peeked into the existing economic landscape of contemporary Nepali theatre in order to identify the business related bottlenecks of the industry.

O kulawym bogu Hefajstosie. W antycznej pracowni Jana Dormana

The paper is an analysis of Jan Dorman’s theatre practice in the context of the classical tradition. It examines the archival collections of The Theatre Institute documenting the collaboration of Jan Dorman with Anna Świrszczyńska on the staging of O kulawym bogu Hefajstosie (“The Lame God Hephaestus”), Świrszczyńska’s radio play. The extant correspondence between the creators of the production and the director’s copies permit us to explore and analyse the ways in which classical antiquity inspired Dorman’s work. Although Dorman never adapted any ancient Greek text to the stage, his practice indicates a strong presence of the classical tradition, in particular the Greek comedy, in his mode of theatre.

Otwarte archiwum Dormana

Besides his art practice, Jan Dorman was creating an archive of his life and work, which is a comprehensive collection of various types of theatre and personal documentation. Like Tadeusz Kantor, he dreamed that the collected resources would continue to be used, entering the theatre and research circuit and thus creating a “living archive”. In 2016, Iwona Dowsilas, Dorman’s daughter and promoter of his archives, donated Jan Dorman’s collection to The Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw, which contributed to a three-year project “Dorman. Open Archives” (2016–2019). It was based on the concept of performative archiving, in which archives cease to be a static collection, and can be set in motion and produce separate performances. The idea of performing archives was translated into a collaborative programme involving theoreticians and practitioners of the theatre, which resulted in the intersecting of four fields: issues of theatre documentation, history and theory of the theatre, theatre education and theatre practice. The current issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny is an outcome of annual research residencies (2018), which aimed to analyse selected areas of the previously unrecognized and little-known last decade of Dorman’s theatre practice (1977–1986).

Origins and Developments: A Brief Overview

The origins of westernized theatre in Turkey lie in the Tanzimat reform movement, which was in turn inspired by the impact of the French Revolution. The institutionalization of this late encounter was made possible by the foundation of municipal theatres (1914) and of state theatres (1949). The municipal theatres have been most influential, and have had more flexible characteristics as they have been minutely connected with tradition. The state theatres, on the other hand, have been on a mission to educate audiences through their large-scale productions, which the private-enterprise theatres would not possibly dare to produce. They have also been tightly connected with Western-style theatre in their repertoire, and in their understanding of dramaturgy and directing in their productions. Today it is still debatable whether these enormous institutional theatres function effectively or not. The fact that the municipal and state theatres are consistently offering the cheapest tickets and yet not managing to keep a loyal group of audiences is one of the reasons why nearly two hundred plays at independent theatres debut in Istanbul every year. There have been attempts to overcome problems of quality inherent in the structure of these theatres by other theatre groups in premises where more elaborate productions of plays from the mainstream have been performed.

Teatr Nasz w Michałowicach, czyli teatr rodzinny i wiejski

Teatr Nasz in Michałowice or a family and village theatre companyThe note concerns Jadwiga and Tadeusz Kuta private theatre, Teatr Nasz Our theatre, which performs in the Karkonosze village of Michałowice. The actors sold their possessions in the city and decided to settle in the mountains, giving up their comfortable jobs in an institutional theatre. Twenty-five years ago they erected a wooden theatre building, a restaurant and cottages for guests in Michałowice. Their spectators flee cities in order to find some rest in Michałowice, and watch cabaret, comedy and musical shows. They also undergo a humor therapy, as it were, and experience the refreshing influence of the mountains.

팽창주의 성향의 피터 홀의 RSC 운영 방식

As the founding Artistic Director of the RSC(1960~1968), the first and a large-scale public institution in the modern UK theatre, Peter Hall(1930~2017) recorded a new chapter in the history of modern theatre through his panoramic artistic and administrative policies. Replacing the age-old tradition of the ''Actor-Manager System'' in the British theatre company management, his emergence signalled the arrival of professional artistic directorship as the ''director- administrator''. Hall founded the RSC with a year-round season from a limited season under the festival structure of its preceding institution, Stratford Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. The foundation of the RSC conditioned the establishment of a permanent company whose predominant members were actors. That was also the realization, for the first time in Britain, of the semi-permanent company with a three-year contract which allowed a creative environment suggesting a basic financial security. With a purpose to establish its inherent acting style to be nurtured by continuous training and work, this concept of company, had originally been derived from the inspiration of those renowned ensemble theatre companies in the European continent. However, unlike them in which the leader''s individual aesthetics had become the principles, Hall''s overall artistic guideline with a particular emphasis on the verse-speaking, aimed at a high quality production. Resisting the past insistence on Shakespearean productions only policy in Stratford since its birth in 1879, Hall opened a London base at the Aldwich Theatre, so as to allow for a dual geographical existence. It was conceived to connect the seasons of the local and the capital cities through company productions. Contrary to the former''s so-called ''Bardolatory'' tendency, the Aldwich''s repertory in which new and modern plays, as amalgamated with other classical works, heralded the RSC''s artistic identity. While intending to achieve a Shakespearean relevance, Hall sought to co-existence and mutually complementary values between the new and modern works with the former, Shakespearean plays. Hall''s vision as such was, indeed, a revolutionary one which called for a paradigm shift in running public theatre institution. His consistent effort made to realize that vision led, finally, to construct the company acting style and the resulting high quality productions. Nevertheless, as the ironic epithet the ''RSC empire'' building recalls, Hall''s over expansionism and frequently an impulsive ambition had to collide with a characteristic financial deficiency in non-profit organizations. Despite his many aggressive strategies to win the necessary amount of government subsidy, the RSC faced with critical financial troubles as its competitive NT took the precedence over it. Hall’s management style of the RSC which is characterized as the expansionist inclination, resulted in a success only in a limited sense. He was able to realize his ideal to create the company acting style by means of founding and operating a semi-permanent company within the RSC structure, and through which he contributed to the development of the modern British theatre. Nevertheless, Hall’s overall leadership that was characteristically expansionist tendency lacked in a consistent policy, principle, philosophy, and methodology.

Kabaret, det revolusjonære og poetiske

In Norway, the theatrical avant-garde, 1920–1950, was oriented towards cabaret dramaturgy and symbolism. There also developed a direction of political theatre, as well as tendencies towards a more poetic-theatrical kind of theatre. Directors such as Agnes Mowinckel and Hans Jacob Nilsen were central to this development in both private and institutional theatres. A monumental realism had already established itself as a Norwegian directing style in connection with the Ibsen-tradition at Nationaltheatret, where Johanne Dybwad was a prominent figure. A major director of the avant-garde was Stein Bugge, who also wrote comedies of the grotesque kind. The article also gives examples of the cabaret culture in the arctic, exemplified by popular revues with participation from traveling directors like the Jewish Salomon Schotland. One can basically speak of a revolutionary avant-garde also, using amateur theatre like in the work of Olav Dalgard. This avant-garde would by the 1950s be followed up by dramatic writers like Tarjei Vesaas and Georg Johannessen, preparing the way for new tendencies of cabaret and laboratory theatre, like ‘Odin Teatret’, founded in Oslo in 1964. The fact that ‘Odin Teatret’ after a couple of years left Norway for Denmark, represented a temporary halt for Norwegian avant-garde until a new social oriented and performative avant-garde came about in the 1970s.

Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer and David G. John

Reviewed by: Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer and David G. John Vera Stegmann Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare. By Joerg Esleben with Rolf Rohmer and David G. John. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. xv + 365. Cloth $52.50. ISBN 978-1487500382. The East German theatre director Fritz Bennewitz (1926–1995) had a colorful career and left a remarkably versatile body of work that may not be widely known outside the field of GDR studies. Born in 1926 in Chemnitz, he was drafted in World War II, taken as a prisoner of war by the Americans in 1945, and had to work in a coal mine. After the war, he studied humanities in Leipzig and theater in Weimar; and from 1953–1955 he was a lecturer on Marxist-Leninist aesthetics at the Theater Academy Leipzig. In 1955 he became senior director of the Meiningen Theater, which he [End Page 182] transformed into the second most important Brecht stage in the GDR. In 1960 Bennewitz took over as director of the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar. Beginning in the 1970s, Bennewitz's artistic career was increasingly shaped by international experiences. He directed plays and conducted workshops in Romania, West Germany, the US, Switzerland, Venezuela, and most frequently in India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Bennewitz first went to India in 1970 to produce Brecht's Threepenny Opera with students at the National School of Drama in New Delhi. This visit initiated a twenty-four-year-long engagement with Indian theatre, during which he returned regularly to India to produce plays. His long-time involvement with the International Theatre Institute and his role as the institute's vice president since 1984 facilitated these visits. In 1991 Bennewitz received the coveted Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the highest award for performing arts in India, as only the second non-Asian to be granted this honor. His last productions concentrated on Goethe's Faust, in Hindi at the Tata Theater in Mumbai and in German at the Meiningen Theater. He could not complete the latter, since he died of cancer in 1995 and was buried at the historical cemetery in Weimar. Research on Bennewitz's work has recently grown dramatically. The Fritz-Bennewitz-Freundeskreis, founded in January 1996, established the Fritz Bennewitz Archive in Leipzig, which is curated by Rolf Rohmer, one of the contributors to the volume. Canadian scholar David G. John, another contributor to this volume, published Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings in 2012; and Esleben's Fritz Bennewitz in India represents the product of team work and the most advanced state of intercultural Bennewitz scholarship to date, for which prominent Indian scholars, such as the cultural critic Rustom Bharucha, were consulted as well. The book is divided into two parts: the larger first part, about two thirds of the volume, covers Bennewitz's letters about his experiences in India, translated and adapted into English by Esleben and presented with Esleben's contextualized commentary and annotations. Interestingly, these letters are now first presented in English; a publication of the original letters in German never materialized, primarily for financial reasons. Most of these letters were addressed to his friend and confidante Waltraut Mertes. It is a one-sided correspondence; Mertes's responses have not been preserved. The shorter second part of the book contains external sources about Bennewitz: a character sketch by the Indian theater personality K.V. Subbanna; excerpts from Esleben's interviews in India with theater practitioners and scholars Amal Allana, Samik Bandyopadhyay, Akshara K.V., Prasanna, and Anuradha Kapur; a biographical essay by Rolf Rohmer; and an article by David G. John on Bennewitz and Brechtian political theater in India. A complete chronology of Bennewitz's productions in South Asia and his Indian projects in Germany, as well as a glossary of Indian and German theatrical terms, complete this rich and detailed sourcebook. Bennewitz's letters cover a fascinating array of subjects. We learn in detail about [End Page 183] Bennewitz's productions of plays by Brecht, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chekhov, and Volker Braun; we hear about the Indian performances that Bennewitz witnessed, and his...

“There would this monster make a man”: Colonial power in the 1993 RSC production of 'The Tempest'

Taking on assumptions about oppression, identity and representation as they are developed in contemporary postcolonial theory, this study proposes the analysis of the 1993 theatrical production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest by The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). It aims to discuss the role of Caliban's monstrosity in the production and how it pertains to issues such as power relations and spectacle. The main benefit of doing an analysis of a performance of a Shakespearean text seems to be the possibility of seeing the play's meaning as contingent, as a result of a series of elements (actor's body, visual clues, the theatrical institution, spectatorship) that release it from the burden of being considered as the work of a single, universal, non- contradictory mind that contemporary criticism has pointed out as the 'Shakespeare Myth'. I conclude that the 1993 RSC production presents a Tempest that, in many ways, reinforces traditional positions about the legitimacy of Prospero's dominion over the island.---Original in English.---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1210

The Sami Theatre from Kauotokeino: On the Trace of Nomads

Beaivváš Sámi Našunálateáhter from Kautokeino (Norway) is an institutional theatre with Sami (Lappish) as the main stage language. Sami institutional theatres in Scandinavia have a relatively brief history which reflects the tension between the Sami people’s sociopolitical aspirations and Sami theatre artists’ freedom of expression. The theatre from Kautokeino is based upon a robust tradition (e.g. such pre-theatrical modes as the yoik, the art of storytelling, the shamanistic séance), and at the same time it is open to impulses from other cultures and theatrical traditions (both European and non-European). The article takes its point of departure in a postmodern concept of nomadism (Deleuze, Guattari, Braidotti, Islam). It focuses on the nomadic as the impetus and the driving force behind the Beaivváš Sámi Našunálateáhter. The nomadic, however, is understood not only as a reference to the Sami cultural heritage, but as an artistic practice based upon the reaction against aesthetically, historically, politically and socially rigid intellectual patterns. The practice is manifested, inter alia, in transgressions of established genres and aesthetic categories, multilingualism and cultural interferences.

State Socialist Experts in Transnational Perspective. East European Circulation of Knowledge during the Cold War (1950s–1980s): Introduction to the Thematic Issue

State socialist experts were at the center of Eastern Europe’s internationalization from the mid-1950s until 1989. They acted as intermediaries between their states and other national, regional, and international environments. The contributions integrate national milieus within broader frameworks mostly circumscribed by inter- and nongovernmental specialized organizations (the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; International Theater Institute, or the un Commission on Population and Development). The issue is an innovative initiative to identify within four fields (economy, demography, theatre, and historical studies) state socialist experts’ contributions to international debates and institution building. We argue that these groups were fundamentally characterized by their transnational dynamism. The resultant forms of mobility and transfer resituate specific systems of knowledge production from Eastern Europe within the larger story of postwar globalization. The collection also includes an anthropological study about the internationalization trajectories of lower-ranked professionals and the resilience of their expertise ethics after 1989. Socialist experts’ mobilities can be circumscribed at the intersection of multiple phenomena that defined the postwar: national settings’ impact on inter- and supra-state interactions; Cold War politics; the tribulations of international organizations; and global trends determined by the accelerating interconnectedness of the world and decolonization. Our findings de-center established narratives about the Cold War and they show how representatives from the East participated in and sometimes determined the conditions of Europeanizing and globalizing trends in their respective fields within particular organizations.

Scenes of Cold War Diplomacy: Romania and the International Theatre Institute, 1956–1969

The article maps Romania’s involvement with the International Theatre Institute during its first decade of membership. The argument revolves around a number of East–West convergence high points such as the 1959 Helsinki Congress or the 1964 Bucharest Symposium. It analyzes the connections developed by Romanian theatre specialists within the framework provided by iti, the specialized networks they helped create and the domestic impact of these interactions. The article examines the multifaceted Romanian involvement with these projects in national and international context. It begins in 1956, Romania’s first participation at the Dramatic Art Festival in Paris, the forerunner of iti’s Theatre of Nations Festival. It closes the arc of the story with the 1969 international symposium on training young theatre directors. The article shows that soon after joining iti ranks, Romanian theatre artist were propelled into the international limelight and were recognized by their Western peers. It advances the idea that East European theatre practitioners had a role in shaping their respective community of knowledge as much as their Western counterparts did.

Organizational-pedagogical, scientific-research and theatrical-critical activity of A. V. Pletniov through the prism of time

Organizational-pedagogical, scientific-research and theatrical-critical activity of A. V. Pletniov through the prism of time

Problems of Teaching Theater Criticism in the First Years of the Kharkiv Theater Institute

Problems of Teaching Theater Criticism in the First Years of the Kharkiv Theater Institute

Path Dependency in Theatre Funding

Estonian contemporary dance emerged in the early 1990s outside established theatre institutions. Since then, it has existed in a project-based format, which means that though dance artists can receive funding for preparing projects, there is no financial support for facilities needed for everyday practice outside or between the projects. The type of venues available for practicing contemporary dance has an impact on choreographic practice presented for the public, even if that dimension often remains invisible.Funding policy, like other policies, is greatly affected by the historical legacy of a particular policy (that is, path dependent), and the same can be claimed about choreographic practice. Therefore, in order to understand why a certain policy or practice prevails and is resistant to change even if it becomes problematic, it is necessary to look at the beginning of the path. In the present article, the history of theatre and dance funding in Estonia is taken as an example to discuss how that history affects the present in terms of choices by dance practitioners. Though Estonia is taken as an example, the situation is far from unique and therefore can serve as a case for analyzing similar situations in other countries.