Dramaturgies in the Sign of Violence. Transnational Theater between Global South and North

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Leon Gabriel
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508024718

The afterlife of the unequally shared transnational history of violence affects with great urgency the performative arts, which are increasingly shaped by positions from the Global South. Based on the assumption that this historicity is reflected in bodies, relations and institutions, the close connection of historical-political situation with aesthetics and conditions of production (forms of working and infrastructures) will be investigated. The aim of the junior research group is to develop a comprehensive theory and analysis of transnational theater between the Global South and the North based on three subprojects with case studies, as well as to explore the specific role of performative art from the Global South in the dispositif of global-transnational 'contemporary theater'. Although aesthetics in its European-Western conception recognizes the connection between work, mode of production, and impact, these aspects were nevertheless conceptually differentiated. Today, this separation is particularly challenged by those performative arts that emerge from the Global South but are eminently influenced by exchanges with the discourse-determining theater structures of the Global North, especially those of Europe. These performative arts illustrate that the conditions of emergence are involved in violent history.The concept of dramaturgy serves as a central tool for analyzing this far-reaching relationship and its potential for change. Because dramaturgies form the friction surface between the aesthetic work and the extra-aesthetic world from which art emerges in the first place, another goal of the junior research group is to investigate how specific dramaturgies between the Global South and the North bundle the contradictions and challenges to European-style aesthetics and how questions of decolonization are thus posed – to aesthetics itself and beyond. Therefore, the inherent asymmetries of transnational performative arts will be elaborated and new approaches of scenic thinking-in-relation will be presented. Thus, the project aims at detaching the concept of dramaturgy from its Eurocentric content and expanding it.Three areas are at the center of the entire research project: a) positions of selected artists and collectives from the Global South, b) corresponding regional rehearsal locations that are characterized by social-environmental engagement beyond the production of art, and c) European festivals and production houses as discourse-determining structures, so-called 'gatekeepers' for access to the field of 'transnational contemporary theater'. The proposed junior research group explores these goals and objects with respective weighting in three subprojects (applicant and two PhD students).

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups