Postdramatic Theater in Eastern Europe since 2000: Spaces, Crises, Revolts
Research Project
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01.02.2023
- 31.12.2028
This project provides the very first comprehensive study of transregional developments in Eastern European postdramatic theater. It analyzes postdramatic theater as a medium that emerges from and reflects on the cultural and political shifts following the postsocialist transformations in Eastern Europe. As an institution that is structurally intertwined with cultural and social crises and that traditionally serves as a platform for public debate, theater in Eastern Europe has recently become an essential venue for reflection and action again. Especially since the 2000s, new postdramatic languages developed that explore forms of destabilizing traditional dramatic functions and modes of transgressing traditional theatrical spaces. These forms of theater have since played a major role both in the performative investigation of social boundaries, upheavals, wars, and autocratic and nationalist politics and in the theatrical exploration of alternative spaces and modes of action in these regions. Despite its importance and unique artistic practices, however, Eastern European postdramatic theater has remained profoundly underestimated by researchers and is largely absent in global postdramatic studies. The main rationale of the project is to rectify that neglect.
