Raumbild, Zeitbild, Sinnbild

For the first time this study provides a deeper insight into the staging oeuvre by Ursel and Karl-Ernst Herrmann. With their Mozart interpretatory, the dramaturge and the stage designer have created a visual cosmos that is unparalleled in its aesthetic design in the field of music theatre. The visual dramaturgy they have developed over the past 35 years is fanned out in multiple perspectives in a transdisciplinary approach that combines art history, philology and philosophy as theatre historiography. In its intellectual breadth, this analysis represents a key work in relation to visual culture studies in theatre.

Bringing a Master Narrative to Its Knees: The Power of Historical Data on Theatre Patrons

For the ‘Rotterdam Project’, a large amount of historical data on patrons of Rotterdam’s main theatres during the ‘long’ 19th century (1773–1914) was collected, digitally registered and statistically analysed. The data was gathered from the theatre archives of the city of Rotterdam and included data on such specifics as ticket sales, repertoire and featured performers. The database holds prosopography information on over 16,000 patrons and almost 15,000 registered ticket sales to these patrons. This dataset (https://doi.org/10.21943/auas.7381127) can be used to make comparisons to the datasets of similarly sized cities in other countries during the same period and for broader research on 19th-century cultural history. So far, the data has been mainly applied to empirically test the master narrative of theatre historiography on the social composition of theatre audiences. The analyses based on the data show that this narrative must, for the most part, be rejected.

Reusing Props at the National Theatre, London: Considering Theatre Materiality in a Historiographical Context

Over the last years, the National Theatre, London (NT) has presented props and costumes in its restaurant, the Green Room, and in its bar, the Propstore, thereby shedding a different light on theatre objects. It also widely advertises the option of hiring costumes and props from its Hire department. These practices challenge theatre studies to reconsider the usage of theatre objects and their manifold stage lives not only as stories of (in)animation, but as what I call potentials of reusage. Presenting theatre objects in unusual locations like a restaurant emphasizes that these objects are built or manipulated in theatre workshops, thereby shedding light on the craftsmanship that is foundational to every production. The labour of the workshops, as well as different backstage operations, has been ignored by theatre historiography. Analysing the NT's different staging of props invites us to look into the hidden histories of theatre materiality.

Scenographing Resistance

In 1942 Vilhelm Moberg’s (1898–1973) highly successful historical novel Ride This Night! (1941) was adapted for the theatre and premiered at several Swedish theatres as well as being distributed as a film. While Sweden maintained what was termed a neutral position during World War II, Moberg’s novel, together with its various performances, facilitated a mood of resistance against Nazism. In recognition of this, the focus of my article is the much-celebrated first performance of Ride This Night at the City Theatre (Stadsteatern) in Gothenburg on 14 October 1942. To explore this performance as theatrical memory of World War II, I draw on recent scenography theory emphasizing the holistic role of material and affective relations between bodies, objects and environments. By doing so, the article contributes an historical case study to the international field of critical scenography, and challenges the ways in which previous Swedish art and theatre historiography has theoretically understood and explored the powers of scenographic traits of past performance.

Political Influence on Theatre Historiography

The article discusses the question of the memory of Jewish history and culture in Lithuania in regard to the cultural and political debates that are actually taking place in Lithuanian society. Historical facts, concerning Jewish cultural life in Lithuania before the Second World War, were eliminated from the research field conducted by historiographers during the Soviet and the early post Soviet times. The article argues that this was due to political aspirations of the country; they play the crucial role in defining what type of memories the society would carry on and defend. In regard to the research done by sociologists Maurice Halbwachs, Jan and Aleida Assmanns notions of collective memory, functional and stored memory are discussed. Examples of the recent media persecutions of cultural personas such as Rūta Vanagaitė and Marius Ivaškevičius are discussed in order to illustrate the memory war that is still taking place in the actual Lithuanian society.

Historiography

The historiography of ‘folk performance’ discusses the existing studies on the subject from the colonial period to the present and points out the discrepancies leading to methodological problems. Scholars have discussed the politics of cultural practice in the context of the colonial and nationalist politics, neo-colonial state’s cultural policies, and in the context of bourgeois morality and sexual politics. These criticisms have exposed the inherent class and gender biases of the colonialists, the nationalist and the middle class that lead to the disavowal of such performances. Nevertheless, these criticisms have remained primarily confined to the level of theatre historiography and counter-discourses. The work is an attempt to go beyond theatre the historiography and counter-discourse modes. It aims to take account of the mode of articulation coming from the alternative sources. Broadly, it discusses the legacies of marginalization that have become part of this performance tradition.

On Being a Twenty-First-Century Theatre Historian

This series of provocations on the changing work of theatre historians opens with a contribution by David Wiles, who recounts a meeting of IFTR's Theatre Historiography Working Group in London in 2018. Wiles's reflection is followed by responses from scholars working in or on different regions, including perspectives by Oscar Tantoco Serquiña, Jr (Philippines), Lorena Verzero (Latin America) and Promona Sengupta (India).

Year 1948: Emancipation of Women and Slovak Theatre.

From the cultural and art point of view, the year 1948 in Czechoslovakia was not just the so-called “Victorious February” of the working people. The remarkable phenomenon of this era, which was related to the post-war political and social movement, was the phenomenon of female emancipation and feminization of the stage production. During the two consecutive theatre seasons 1947/1948 and 1948/1949, at The New Scene Theatre of the National Theatre in Bratislava, several women, led by the director Magda Husaková-Lokvencová created several productions. For the first time, a sovereign feminine alliance had emerged in our performance art, proving that conceptual and thoughtful theatrical production may not be just the domain of men. These women contributed to deconstructing the beliefs of typically male and typically female professions as well as transforming traditional views of the role and position of both sexes in society and the arts. The attention of theatre historiography in the recapitalization of the impacts of the breakthrough events of the Czechoslovak post-war politics of the forty years on cultural events so far focused mainly on the issues of dramaturgy and poetics, the process of ideological transformation and the sovietisation of art in the spirit of socialist realism. The subject of socialist emancipation and theatre was at the edge of the interest of our theatrology. Ten years ago, a collective monograph, dedicated to the first lady of the Slovak theatre directors, Magda Husaková-Lokvencová, managing to free her forgotten personality and work and return her to the context of Slovak theatre history in the second half of the 20th century. There is still room for further research, complementing the knowledge and reflection of the advent of women in the sphere of theatre directory, dramaturgy and scenography artwork, as part of the history of gender relations in Slovakia. Increased interest in the history of women provokes a new reflection on the issue of emancipation and theatre.

‘Mere Lookers-On at Life’: Point of View and Spectator Narrative

This essay develops a new approach to print narratives about theatregoing during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Immensely popular with contemporary readers, theatrical memoirs and diaries have been a boon to theatre historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but these texts have more often been studied in spite of their subjective perspectives than because of them. Building on work in theatre historiography and audience studies, this essay seeks to transform the spectator’s discursive acts of shaping, framing, and stressing from an obstacle into an opportunity. In order to resituate historical spectator narratives in a wider narrative context, I read diaries and essays by Henry Crabb Robinson and Lady Maud Tree in conversation with Charlotte Brontë’s fictional scenes of spectatorship in Villette. This intertextual approach, I suggest, yields a more complete understanding of how different points of view facilitated claims about performance. In particular, I explore how gender affected point of view. While male reviewers and diarists often employ a disinterested narrative persona that de-emphasises their own bodies, I argue that many actress autobiographies craft an alternative form of narrative authority that makes use of the limitations of embodiment – qualities like immobility, bodily sensation, and circumscribed vision.