Theatre Institutions in Crisis examines how theatre in Europe is beset by a crisis on an institutional level and the pressing need for robust research into the complex configuration of factors at ...work that are leading to significant shifts in the way theatre is understood, organised, delivered, and received.
Balme and Fisher bring together scholars from different disciplines and countries across Europe to examine what factors can be said to be most common to the institutional crisis of European theatre today. The methods employed are drawn from systems theory, social-scientific approaches, economics and statistics, theatre and performance, and other interpretative approaches (hermeneutics), and labour studies.
This book will be of great interest to researchers, students, and practitioners working in the fields of performance and theatre studies. It will be particularly relevant to researchers with a specific interest in European theatre and its networks.
Long description: The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was an event of global significance. Despite this fact, public attention and even research mostly focused on Russia and the other states that ...became part of USSR for many decades. The impact of these dramatic events on other parts of the world was neglected or not systematically explored until recently. And in analyzing the events, political history still dominates the field. This volume, which is largely based on papers presented at the third annual conference of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, adds to this image some valuable perspectives by exploring the culture as well as the political and cultural legacy of the Russian Revolution. Three focal points are taken here: the revolution’s rhetoric and performance, its religious semantics, and its impact on Asia.
Biographical note: Christopher Balme holds the chair in theatre studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
Burcu Dogramaci is Professor of 20th Century and Contemporary Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
Christoph Hilgert is historian and former press and public outreach officer of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies.
Riccardo Nicolosi is Professor of Slavic Literatures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
Andreas Renner is Professor of Russian / Asian Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
Signs of difference Balme, Christopher
Orbis litterarum,
December 2021, 2021-12-00, 20211201, Letnik:
76, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Shylock and Othello are the characters in the Shakespearean oeuvre with the clearest racial markers. However one interprets the ethnic characteristics of ‘the Moor’—as a light‐skinned Arab or as a ...darker ‘African’—he seems to be a character marked by clear racial distinctions vis‐à‐vis the other figures. Shylock also has an iconographic history of racial marking. In this paper I shall examine how both figures can be read as tokens of ethnic or racial anxiety. Shakespeare’s African play is one of the works seldom performed in the contemporary German repertoire system. The Merchant of Venice is more frequently performed but poses different problems in terms of visual representation. It will be argued that German director’s theatre, with its love of experimentation and above all bold metaphoric images, is uncomfortable with the metonymic representation implied by ethnic casting. The discussion draws on Othello and The Merchant of Venice in productions by Fritz Kortner, Peter Zadek, George Tabori and Luk Perceval. Whereas Kortner, Zadek and Tabori stage the alterity figures in a mode of hypertrophic blackness or Jewish stereotyping bordering on (or indeed transgressing) overt racism, Perceval’s Othello is white and the alterity conflict seems to be one of age and gender not race.
Drawing on new research from the ERC project ‘Developing Theatre’, this collection presents innovative institutional approaches to the theatre historiography of the Global South since 1945. Covering ...perspectives from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe, the chapters explore how US philanthropy, international organisations and pan-African festivals all contributed to the globalisation and institutionalisation of the performing arts in the Global South. During the Cultural Cold War, the Global North intervened in and promoted forms of cultural infrastructure that were deemed adaptable to any environment. This form of technopolitics impacted the construction of national theatres, the introduction of new pedagogical tools and the invention of the workshop as a format. The networks of 'experts; responsible for this foreground seminal figures, both celebrated (Augusto Boal, Efua Sutherland) but also lesser known (Albert Botbol, Severino Montano, Metin And), who contributed to the worldwide theatrical epistemic community of the postwar years. Developing Theatre in the Global South investigates the institutional factors that led to the emergence of professional theatre in the postwar period throughout the decolonising world. The book’s institutional and transnational approach enables theatre studies to overcome its still strong national and local focus on plays and productions, and connect it to current discourses in transnational and global history.
Festivals in the COVID Age of Crisis Ali, Roaa; Balme, Christopher
Contemporary theatre review,
10/2022, Letnik:
32, Številka:
3-4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article examines the impact of COVID on festivals and the future of the industry. Analysing more than 50 items of online news, scholarly reviews and reports, and governmental guidance, this ...article examines the immediate effects of COVID in the industry as a whole, and particularly on its precarious artists and workforce. It also explores the changing behavioural attitudes towards festivals. Importantly, the article looks at the long-term institutional changes that might emerge in the festival industry including the future of collaborative working, artistic support, precarious working, and diversity.
New Compatriots Balme, Christopher
The Journal of Pacific history,
12/2007, Letnik:
42, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In the 1950s, Theodor W. Adorno recalled how the sound of a kettledrum invariably produced associations with the Samoan troupes he had seen as a child in the Frankfurt zoo during the first decade of ...the 20th century. From 1895 to the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany received regular visits by Samoan performance troupes imported and organised by the impresarios Carl and Felix Marquardt. While Germans were well accustomed to the spectacles of exotic performances thanks to the famous ethnographic shows promoted by the Hamburg impresario Carl Hagenbeck, the Samoan troupes were framed in a different discursive context. The Marquardts positioned the Samoan performers in an unusual balancing act between alterity and familiarity, savagery and aesthetics. Their marketing of Samoan performance was closely keyed into the prevailing colonial discourse that attempted to sell Samoa and Samoans as kindred spirits of the Germans. On the basis of archival material, an assessment of colonial publications and photographic material, this paper examines the Samoan troupes in the context of aestheticisation and asks how spectators positioned themselves vis-à-vis these performances.
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