Global Theatre Histories: Modernization and the emergence of a transnational public sphere (1860-1960).

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The aim of this project is to investigate the emergence of theatre as a globalphenomenon over the past century. Seen from the present it is astounding to manythat theatre, an ‘old’ medium that has been repeatedly pronounced moribund with thearrival of each successive wave of technological media, has in fact continued toflourish and expand.Today, theatre is a global artistic practice, a crucial cultural institution in manycountries and a central part of transnational networks of artistic exchange. Oftendefying exact definition, its manifestations range from improvised street theatre inbackyard slums to multi-million-dollar edifices purveying the latest performances ofnineteenth-century opera to 21st century cultural elites. Despite its bewilderingnumber of forms that include puppet theatre, stand-up comedy and abstractperformance art, theatre-makers and audiences are connected across cultures bymutual recognition of commonality in what they do. Investigation of this artistic andcultural diversity has been a hallmark of theatre and performance studies over the pasttwo decades. The still rapidly expanding disciplines of theatre and performancestudies have devoted themselves primarily to understanding the semantic specificityof performances on the basis of a number of commonly shared theoretical andmethodological tools (in the main semiotics, and more recently phenomenology andperformance theory). What theatre studies has not yet attempted to do is to explainhow this global phenomenon came to be. What were the factors that led to aparticular, mainly Western, artistic practice being exported to and established inentirely diverse cultural environments? How did these processes of transpositionaffect the new host cultures and how did they in turn change the practices beingexported?The project aims to provide a major corrective to existing theatre historiographicalprinciples and research agendas by linking theatrical modernism (as an artisticpractice) and modernization in its political, economic and institutional manifestations.The temporal coordinates of the project parallel the acceleration of colonialism andimperialism leading ultimately to political decolonization in the early 1960s and thegeopolitical realignments marked by the collapse of Eastern European socialism.The main focus will be on hitherto under-researched phenomena: theatrical traderoutes facilitating the movement of theatre artists and productions (in the first period);the creation of new public spheres in situations of cross-cultural contact in multiethnicmetropolitan centres and the dynamics of theatrical modernization in non-Westerncountries.The objectives of the project can be summarized as follows:• to define and theorize theatre as a cultural practice that is not only local but in itsinstitutional manifestations inherently global. It is this focus on the institutional andglobal dimensions as opposed to its aesthetic and local specificities that marks aradical break with existing research paradigms.• to examine the role of theatre in its function and perception as a cultural institutionagainst the background of contemporary debates over the ‘crisis of modernization’and ‘multiple modernities’. In this sense theatre can be regarded as a paradigm forunderstanding how the dynamics and contradictions of modernization led to theemergence of new artistic institutions and the public spheres that support them.• At its most ambitious, the project will result in the establishment of a new subfieldof theatre and performance studies that could be termed – provisionally – globaltheatre histories. Over its five-year period it will demonstrate the ground-breakingpotential of this new approach and outline the interdisciplinary team-basedapproaches necessary to implement it.