The World and the Stage: Reassessing Theatrical Paradigms, Envisioning Global Rights
This seminar seeks to reassess key twentieth-century theatrical paradigms (Brecht’s “Verfremdung,” Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed,” and others) associated with the generation of critical consciousness and strategies for social and political intervention, as they are mobilized in the context of globalization. Our inquiry focuses on the creative tensions and paradoxes that these paradigms pose in a transnational context defined through and in response to global capitalism, neoliberalism, the establishment of international human rights, the revision of physical and virtual borders, and changing notions of citizenship. Within this framework we seek to re-evaluate the relationship between the stage and the social world by addressing the following key questions and issues:
- How might the destabilization of national sovereignty, together with the growing presence of an international human rights network and the influence of universal legal jurisdiction, necessitate a reassessment of theater’s engagement with human rights?
- In what ways does theater imagine performative frameworks, embody new spaces and subjectivities, highlight tensions between competing paradigms, and promote critical dialogue on human rights?
- How have these paradigms been adapted and revised historically in concrete cultural contexts, and what are the specific political implications of this adaptation? In what ways are these twentieth-century paradigms compatible with new modes and ways of framing activism and political intervention?
This seminar is part of an ongoing collaborative research project that will culminate in an edited volume.