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

这个项目的目的是研究戏剧作为一种全球现象在过去世纪的出现。从现在的情况来看，戏剧这种随着技术媒体浪潮的到来而一再被宣告垂死的“古老”媒介，实际上却继续繁荣和发展，这令许多人感到震惊。今天，戏剧是一种全球性的艺术实践，是许多国家的重要文化机构，也是跨国艺术交流网络的核心部分。它的表现形式常常违反确切的定义，从贫民窟后院的即兴街头剧院到为21世纪世纪文化精英提供最新世纪歌剧表演的数百万美元的大厦。尽管木偶剧、单口喜剧和抽象表演艺术的形式令人眼花缭乱，但戏剧制作者和观众通过对他们所做事情的共同性的相互认可而将不同文化联系在一起。对这种艺术和文化多样性的调查是过去二十年戏剧和表演研究的一个标志。戏剧和表演研究的学科仍在迅速扩展，它们主要致力于在一些共同的理论和方法工具（主要是符号学，最近还有现象学和表演理论）的基础上理解表演的语义特性。戏剧研究还没有尝试去解释这种全球现象是如何形成的。是什么因素导致了一个特定的，主要是西方的，艺术实践被输出到并建立在完全不同的文化环境中？这些转换过程是如何影响新的东道国文化的？它们又是如何改变正在出口的做法的？该项目旨在通过将戏剧现代主义联系起来，（作为一种艺术实践）和现代化的政治，该项目的时间坐标与殖民主义和帝国主义的加速并行，最终导致20世纪60年代初的政治非殖民化，以及以东欧崩溃为标志的地缘政治重组。欧洲社会主义。主要关注的是迄今为止研究不足的现象：促进戏剧艺术家和作品流动的戏剧贸易路线（第一阶段）;在多民族大都市中心跨文化接触的情况下创造新的公共领域以及非西方国家戏剧现代化的动力。·将戏剧定义为一种文化实践，并将其理论化，这种文化实践不仅是地方性的，而且在其制度表现形式上具有内在的全球性。正是这种对制度和全球维度的关注，而不是其美学和地方特性，标志着与现有研究范式的根本突破。以当代关于“现代化危机”和“多元现代性”的争论为背景，考察戏剧作为一种文化机构在其功能和认知中的作用。在这个意义上，戏剧可以被视为理解现代化的动力和矛盾如何导致新艺术机构和支持它们的公共领域出现的范式。在其最雄心勃勃的，该项目将导致建立一个新的子领域的戏剧和表演研究，可以被称为-暂时-全球戏剧史。在五年的时间里，它将展示这一新方法的突破性潜力，并概述实施这一方法所需的跨学科团队方法。

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.