Theatre ReDefined · Redefining the Agency: Post-1989 Crises of Czech and Former East German Theatre

Redefining the Agency: Post-1989 Crises of Czech and Former East German Theatre

Theatre has been a steady component and often a powerful agent of societal developments for more than two thousand years. Therefore, the project was interested in how the mutual relationship between theatre and the society functions: to what extent theatre can influence social developments and how theatre itself is determined by the society. In particular, the project examined situation in theatre of the post-Communist European countries after 1989, using the former East German and Czech theatre landscapes as examples. While prior to the year 1989, theatres in both countries played an important social role, since they co-initiated the end of Communist regimes, historians claim that the year 1989 represented a turning point when theatre lost its social relevance and faced a “theatre crisis”. The project, however, revealed that the years 1989 and 1990 represented neither an institutional, nor aesthetic watershed in theatre histories of the two countries, the multilayered transformative processes taking place in the early 1990s notwithstanding. The project even hypothesized this state of affairs was not reserved to Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic and Germany, but concerned all Sovietized European countries and suggested an outline of future comparative research to be conducted throughout post-Communist Europe. Multiple symptoms of continuity were identified: barring a few exceptions, the Czech theatre system was preserved and even expanded after 1989 to include emerging commercial and experimental ensembles. In the former GDR, theatre system was forced to adapt to the west German theatre model, however, its majority was also kept. In terms of aesthetic developments, the year 1989 accelerated trends such as “postmodernism” and “postdramatic theatre” present in the countries already in the 1980s. Another aspect of continuity was demonstrated by tracing philosophical and aesthetic sources of various notions of theatre’s social role that were brought up at the time. In the Czech theatre, continuity with the pre-Communist era was discerned, going back to the Prague Linguistic Circle’s structuralist theory. In German case, Bertolt Brecht’s concept of theatre’s social role was influential, and new conceptualisations emerged after 1989 – e. g. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s “transformation narrative” of the 1990’s theatre, inspired by Victor Turner’s theory. The in-depth survey proceeded along the intersection of theatre studies, media studies and political history and a new methodology was applied: a combination of performance analysis and discourse analysis, which produced an exceptionally complex and multidimensional perspective on the examined developments. A parallel goal of the project was to foster the professional development of the Principal Investigator. Since she gained a new expertise in German and comparative theatre history and her second monograph will be published soon, her future working prospects multiplied.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union