At its core is the question of how national theatres are used (even today) to constitute nations / national identities. Even if national theatres would help to preserve traditional theatre cultures, the attempted appropriation of theatre by nationalist tendencies must be countered by an open and critical discourse.
Date: 30.11.2021
Time: 10am - 8:30pm
Event Title: Performing Tangier Festival (17th Edition): II. The Poetics and Politics of National Theatre(s) between Globalism and Localism
Event Type: Konferenz
Category: BMBF
Organisor: ICPS - International Centre for Performance Studies, Tangier - in Kooperation mit: IRC 'Interweaving Performance Cultures' - Free University, Berlin; University of New England, Tangier; Faculty of Humanties - Abdelmalek Essadi University, Tetouan
Location: TANGIER & TETOUAN, MOROCCO // plus Live-Stream & Zoom-Webinar (links will be provided via the website on the day of the event)
However strenuous their efforts may be, theatre practitioners are sure to stumble upon a cacophony of voices, some of which are suppressed and muffled for a singular narrative to supersede and prevail for the sake of harmony. To speak of a stable homogeneous identity instead of identities in process is to err monumentally. While en route to unearthing roots, national theatre runs the risk of losing sight of the current struggles of minorities, the disenfranchised and wretched, only to be focused on celebrating a past that was never there in the first place.
Eventually, a national theatre geared solely towards the past could be appropriated, tamed and turned into yet another state apparatus exercising velvet power in the hands of a few said to be representative of the whole. Having been inspired by discussions during previous conferences, we propose a double-edged and multi-perspectival dialogue, which is artist-driven and research-oriented, one to which our guests are welcome to join.
It is a call for a more critical and anatomical attentiveness to forms in motion produced performatively and nationally in the context of on-going processes of interweaving between performance cultures from here and there in an atmosphere marked by the rise of national theatres. These forms have become so visible and audible in multifarious contexts that academics cannot afford to scant them any longer.
We invite scholars from around the world to join the debate and reflect on various problems related to the following proposed questions and topics: - Interweaving performance cultures: Perspectives from the Global South - Alternative ways of seeing and doing theatre: towards the formation and production of new identities - Rethinking theatre from below/from top-down to bottom-up approaches: the rebirth of theatre for all - Performing otherness in zones of contact and friction - Minorities in the decolonial context of a new 'performative turn' in contemporary world performance cultures - Signs of assimilation, contiguity, change, persistence and resistance in decolonial discursive performative praxis - The glocal affirmative (re)turn of national theatre - National theatre in the post-colonial contex - National theatre between (dis)unity and (dis)conformity, the global and the local.
