European Theatre Perspectives
Exploring channels for cross-cultural engagement in performance
The European Theatre Perspectives symposium (ETP) offers a forum dedicated to exploring new channels for cross‑cultural dialogue and engagement in performance. Bringing together practitioners and researchers working in different regional, linguistic, and disciplinary contexts, this international event will facilitate wide-ranging discussion of current issues and debates in the field.
As Homi K. Bhabha has argued, terms of cultural engagement are themselves produced performatively, through ongoing negotiation, rearticulation, and hybridization. ETP therefore focuses on movements of knowledge and know-how that traverse European borders, broadly conceived; that is, it encompasses not only dynamics of exchange and mediation across Europe, but also what Erika Fischer-Lichte calls ‘processes of interweaving performance cultures’ between Europe and other world regions.
Through a range of mixed-mode panels and presentations, ETP aims to gather insights and perspectives on work that has sought to bridge disparate communities in innovative ways – including via theatre- and performance-making, research, translation, documentation, emerging technologies, activism, and other forms of reciprocal recognition or co-action. In particular, symposium contributions will address issues of cultural transfer relating to the following areas:
• multilingualism, adaptation, and cultural translatability
• communicating embodied technique and experience
• practices of identity, witnessing, and collective remembering
• migration and statelessness
• strategies of disruption, resistance, and care
• forums, networks, and community practices
• digital arts and humanities
• publishing, preservation, ethics, and access initiatives
• models of support and sustainability
Alongside and in dialogue with this sharing of learning and expertise, the event will provide a rare collaborative space for thinking through a key strategic challenge for the field, as set out by Janelle Reinelt in a speech in Wrocław during her presidency of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), and then published in TDR: The Drama Review (51.3). Using Open Space Technology, this extended session will invite participants to consider ways of addressing in practice what Reinelt calls ‘the political project of building a truly international performance culture’, appropriate to the diversity and connecting flows of social life in and beyond Europe today.
Registration
Attendance is free, but registration is required as places are limited. Booking is open now at www.etpsymposium.eventbrite.co.uk.
For additional information and updates, visit www.culturehub.co/etp and follow the symposium convenors on Twitter (@CultureHubTeam).
Co-organisers
Culture Hub (UK) and the Grotowski Institute (Poland)
Convenors: Duncan Jamieson, Adela Karsznia
