Peter Boenisch: Contests over a privileged praxis: Institutional transformations in contemporary European theatre  

Our AUFF-funded research project Reconfigur­ing dramaturgy for a global culture: Changing practices in 21^st Century European theatre investigated current attempts to reposition (mainly publicly funded) theatre institutions within a shifting socio-cultural context. In this new “post-representational” reality, as art scholar Nora Sternfeld calls it, traditional ‘high art’ institutions like museums and theatres no longer affirmatively represent cultural capi­tal, civic Bildung and natio­n­al prestige, and instead of being able to rely on the subscriber patronage of  middle-class, educated, White audiences, they must confront a globalised, media­tised, political­ly split plural public sphere. In this lecture, I will less focus on concrete institutional case studies, but instead concentrate on principal conceptual and theoretical insights that emerged from their analysis. In particular, I will focus on the potential of an extended dramaturgic analysis to identify the shifting institutional values, and moreover to analyse the contest over the institution as a public space of appearance and of public communication. Far more than mere organisational restructuring, the institutional transformations we have investigated reveal such a “post-representational” renegotiation of the role of theatre as institutionalised cultural praxis, in a strict Arendtian sense: as not (only) facilitating the production of theatre art works, but as a crucial mediating practice-process qua its institutional expository agency. We here can glimpse the transformation of theatre institutions from their role as bulwarks of national cultural identity towards becoming negotiators of common societal (inter-)relations that Arendt termed (human) “inter-esse”: the neither expressive nor affirmative being in-between that is a fundamental prerequisite for the engagement with the complex, plural reality of the present.

BIO
Peter M. Boenisch is Professor of Dramaturgy at Aarhus University since 2019. Originally from Munich (Germany), he previously worked at LMU Munich and in the UK, among others at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama/University of London. His research areas are Regietheater, dramaturgy, and the intersections of theatre and politics, as they become manifest in aspects such as spectatorship, the institutional conditions of theatre production, and transcultural performance in a globalised Europe. He is also the current president of the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance (EASTAP).

• Program, Æstetisk Seminar E2024
• Plakat, Æstetisk Seminar E2024

Æstetisk Seminar E2024 er tilrettelagt af Christiane Særkjær og Jan Løhmann Stephensen, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.