Abstract
Theater is a universal form of human expression: somebody transforming him/herself into somebody else for an onlooking audience. From its archaic origin in ritual and cult and its earliest written form in Greek drama, community formation was perhaps its most essential function. This chapter sketches developments from its Greek beginnings (still influential today) through to the transformation into the “national theater” of modern Europe to the present state of a transnational and transcultural opening. It addresses the problem of breaking the restrictions of homogeneous (national) language and culture codes and points at the chances offered by an emphasis on the “performative,” in particular on the foregrounding of the living body and human’s existential rootedness against an increasing virtual reality created by the modern media. A “global” theater may be conceived not only as protest against the traditional (European) Bildungstheater and a modification of Enlightenment universalism, but as a conflicting negotiation of heterogeneity and an assertion of our common physical rootedness.
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Notes
- 1.
Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, London/New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 32.
- 2.
Schneider, Helmut J., Humanity’s Imaginary Body: The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy and the New Theater Experience in the Eighteenth Century, in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 82 (2008), pp. 382–399.
- 3.
UNESCO, Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions: Making it Work (2005), online at www.culturelink.org/publics/joint/diversity01/Obuljen_Unesco.de/ike-konvenetion.html (last accessed 28.11.2017).
- 4.
Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, New York: Routledge, 1988 (revised edition of Idem, Essays on Performance Theory, Drama Book Specialists, 1976).
- 5.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London/New York: Routledge, 1994.
- 6.
Helmuth Plessner, Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers, in: Idem, Mit anderen Augen. Aspekte einer philosophischen Anthropologie, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982, pp. 146–163 (German original 1949).
- 7.
Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance. A New Aesthetics, London/New York: Routledge, 2008.
- 8.
Erika Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Interweaving Cultures in Performance. Different States of Being In-Between, in New Theatre Quarterly 25/2009, pp. 391–401; online at www.textures-platform.com/wp_context/uploads/2010/08/interweaving-cultures-in-performance.pdf, p.13 (last accessed 28.11.2017).
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Schneider, H.J. (2019). Theater. In: Kühnhardt, L., Mayer, T. (eds) The Bonn Handbook of Globality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90382-8_18
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