The seminar will take place as online webinar via Zoom.

Monday 21 June 2021, 10.00-11.30 (CET)

Please register HERE in advance to receive the Zoom invitation.

Contemporary European theatre and performance practices and epistemological reflections are at challenging crossroads of multilayered cultural encounters and diversities and individual and collective identity constructions along with processes of othering and aesthetic strategies of inclusion and exclusion. In this connection, dynamics of power-relation and politics of perception connected to issues of representation and diversity in European theatre raise the following question: Who should or may represent whom on a stage, especially concerning certain manifestations of otherness, such as in the case of people with physical disabilities and/or from other sociocultural backgrounds? How to deal with the otherness of the person(s) portrayed has become a contentious issue in the contemporary context of diverse and societies in Europe?

In the form of an introductory and overview presentation, this lecture appeals to an intersectional (imagination) approach as an analytical perspective to look at and question some interconnected dynamics of power-relation and politics of perception connected to issues of representation and diversity in European theatre.

Dr. Koku G. Nonoa is a literary and cultural scholar with an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research interest in theater and performance art. He is a postdoctoral researcher in German Studies at the University of Luxembourg, where he is a member of the steering committee of the Master's program “Theater Studies and Interculturality” and a member of the consortium team of the key research area “Migration and Inclusive Societies” (MIS). His publications include Postdramatic Theatre as Transcultural Theatre (2018, eds. with Teresa Kovacs), “Le théâtre contemporain en Europe face aux variations et défis d’un texte sur l’épineuse question migratoire: Les suppliants  d´Elfriede Jelinek” (2018, Variations – Literaturzeitschrift der Universität Zürich), “COVID-19 Crisis: Response-Ability and Responsibility of Theatre” (2020, eds. Georg Mein/Johannes Pause), Gegenkulturelle Tendenzen im postdramatischen Theater (Countercultural Tendencies in Postdramatic theatre, 2020), “Léonora Miano et son concept de l´identié frontière au théâtre” (2021/Forthcoming, eds. Julia Borst et. al), “Negotiating Migration in European Theater in/beyond ‘Thinking-as-Usual’” (2021/Forthcoming, eds. Annimari Juvonen/Verena Lindemann Lino).“    

See Poster here