Theater Without Borders. Early Modern Transnational Theatre: Politics, Identities, Recognitions (Strasbourg)

**

Early modern theatre is a political device. It represents and deconstructs power, it shapes identities, it debates differences, embodies, bridges, and sometimes censors them. It re-creates a political world that the audience can embrace, reject or question. It negotiates crucial encounters with diverse others, between nations, cultures, races and epistemologies. It encourages the spectator to recognize, as Montaigne wrote, “in the fable on stage, the shadow and sign of the tragic plays of human fortune”.
 
Against the odds, theatre brings us recognition, anagnorisis, which gives rise to new insights about human connection. For the 2022 conference in Strasbourg, TWB invites interventions that will foster re-cognitions – rethinking, reorienting, and, possibly, revelations: 
· re-cognition of theatre that shadows selves and questions the signs that delimit and alienate them;
· re-cognition of theatrical spaces and fictions that are endangered by pandemics, racism, climate change, neo-fascism;
· re-cognition of the capital flows and agendas of power that feed and censor theatre in all its forms;
· re-cognition of the power of whiteness as the default category of self in theatre as usual, and the urgency of diversifying and even fracturing that monumental whiteness.
 
Contributions to the conference will focus on the theatre and performance culture of early modernity in its transnational dimensions, in order to highlight the proximities and differences between the dramatic practices of various languages and cultures. We also invite proposals for other formats (roundtable, report on educational or theatrical experience, performance, etc.) to bring together the themes of race, politics, and diversity.

PROGRAM

Tuesday, June 28th
 
1:30-2:00        Arrival and Coffee
 
2:00-2:15        Welcome to Participants
 
2:15-3:45        Paper Session: “Performances without Borders” 
Chair: Robert Henke (Washington University in St. Louis)
M. A. Katritzky (The Open University) “Skimmington and Charivari:  Cultural Reflections of English and European Performative Social Shaming Rituals”
Guillaume Navaud (Lycée Henri-IV, Paris) “Aristotle’s Poetics and Performance: Perspectives on the History of Poetical Normativity”  
 
3:45-4:00        Coffee break
 
4:00-5:30        Paper Session: “Race, Travel and Trade” 
Chair: Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago)
Susanne Wofford (New York University) “Marina, Pericles, and Eunuchus: Slavery, Race and Genre in the Classical and Early Modern Mediterranean”
Grégory Pierrot (University of Connecticut at Stamford) “Between the Stage and the Staging Docks: Culture, Politics and Trade in the Theatre of Early Independent Haiti”
 
Wednesday, June 29th
 
9:15-10:45      Paper Session: “Performing Differences”
                        Chair: Pavel Drábek (University of Hull)
Jennie Youssef (City University of New York) “Couscous And Alcuzcuz: Early Modern Foodways And Onstage Representations Of Difference”
Friedemann Kreuder (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz) “Staging Differences. Mise-en-scène and interference of human differentiation in contemporary German speaking postdramatic theatre”
 
10:45-11:00    Coffee break 
 
11:00-12:30    Paper Session: “Italian Politics and Identities”
                        Chair: Clotilde Thouret (Université de Lorraine)
Erith Jaffe-Berg (University of California, Riverside) “Traversing Cultural and Religious Identities through Performance in Early-Modern Mantua”
Alessandro Metlica (Università degli Studi di Padova) “Staging Republicanism: Festivals And Festival Books In Seventeenth-Century Venice”
 
12:30-2:15      Lunch
 
2:15-3:45        Paper Session: “Actors and Actresses on stage and on page”
                        Chair: François Lecercle (Sorbonne Université)
Pamela Allen Brown (University of Connecticut) “Uncanny Effigy: Naming And Blaming The Diva”
Flavie Kerautret (Université Paris Nanterre) “Star System in the French Seventeenth Century. Actors’ names in publishing practices”
 
3:45-4:00        Coffee break 
 
4:00-4:45        Véronique Lochert (Université de Haute-Alsace): Introduction to evening performance
 
7:00-8:45        Performance at the Auditorium of the Bibliothèque Nationale Universitaire (6, place de la République). Doors open at 6:30.
Florilège Molière, by the Company La Fabrique à théâtre
Talkback following the performance
 
Thursday, June 30th
 
9:00-10:00      Steering committee meeting 
 
10: 00              Coffee break
 
10:15-11:45    Paper Session: “Female Politics of Patronage”
                        Chair: Clare McManus (University of Roehampton)
Jessica Goethals (University of Alabama) “Dramatizing the Politics of Pregnancy and Patronage”
Véronique Lochert (Université de Haute-Alsace) “Dedications to Women in European Theater: between Poetics and Politics”
 
11:45-12:30    Paper Session: “Transnational Shakespeare” 
                        Chair: Rémi Vuillemin (University of Strasbourg)
Rob Henke (Washington University in St. Louis) “Italian Sources in The Merchant of Venice: Il Pecorone and The Commedia dell’Arte ”
 
12:30-2:15      Lunch
 
2:15-3:30        Roundtable: Research without borders
Chair: Melissa Walter (University of the Fraser Valley)
With: Alani Hicks-Bartlett (Brown University), Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago), Sonia Velázquez (Indiana University, Bloomington), Enrica Zanin (Université de Strasbourg).
                        
3:30-3:45        Coffee break 
 
3:45-5:15        Zoom Session
                        Chair: Susanne Wofford (New York University)
 
Shormishtha Panja (University of Delhi) “Macbeth visits Manipur”
 
Friendly discussion with remote TWB participants
 
                        Travel by tram to the theatre Le Maillon (1, Boulevard de Dresde)
 
6: 00                Apéritif with Barbara Engelhardt, director of the European theatre Le Maillon: how to run a theatre on the border?
 
Friday, July 1st
 
9:15-10:45      Paper Session: “Theater Polemics”
                        Chair: M. A. Katritzky (The Open University)
Clotilde Thouret (Université de Lorraine) “Theatre Controversies as 'Dispositifs': Appropriations, Recognitions, Negociations”
Clément Scotto di Clemente (Sorbonne Université) “Plague, Synagogue of Satan: Anachronism In The War Against Theatre” 
 
10:45-11:00    Coffee break 
 
11:00-12:30    Paper Session: “Shakespeare beyond borders”
Chair: Pamela Allen Brown (University of Connecticut)
Melissa Walter (University of the Fraser Valley) “Garden Transformations: Plants, Pastoral, Stories”
Clare McManus (University of Roehampton) “Shakespeare on the Ropes: Cleopatra’s ‘Sweating Labour’”