About the project
Global theatre histories (started in April 2010) will concentrate on structures and processes that link nations and cultures rather than emphasize their cultural specificity. Areas of focus must take cognizance of the fact in the late 19th and early 20th century theatre was driven by a double imperative: trade and ideas. Theatre as trade was motivated mainly by economic exigencies that seldom if ever joined with the imperatives of national cultural policy. It operated along continental and intercontinental trade routes, which, with a few notable exceptions such as the Meiningen theatre or the Ballets Russes, have seldom been studied in any depth. First theatrical contact in colonies and in non-colonized territories alike was usually with the commercial variety of Western theatre. Of equal or even greater importance for a study of ‘global theatre histories’ are the multifarious connections between metropolitan centres.
Aims and objectives
The aim of the project is to investigate the emergence of theatre as a global phenomenon against the background of imperial expansion and modernization in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The project will link two previously separate scholarly debates: ‘global or world history’ and recent discussions on the emergence of a ‘transnational public sphere’. The project aims to provide a major corrective to existing theatre historiographical principles and research agendas by linking theatrical modernism (as an artistic practice) and modernization in its political, economical and institutional manifestations. The temporal coordinates of the project parallel the acceleration of colonialism and imperialism leading ultimately to political decolonization in the early 1960s and finally the end of the East-West division in 1990. The main focus will be on hitherto under-researched phenomena: theatrical trade routes facilitating the movement of theatre artists and productions; the creation of new public spheres in situations of cross-cultural contact in multiethnic metropolitan centres and the dynamics of theatrical modernization in non-Western countries.