Problem statement
Since the European Middle Ages, the fates of theatre and the city have been intertwined. Mystery plays thrived amidst the urban guilds of medieval Paris, city comedies heralded merchant capitalism in seventeenth-century London, and Ottoman shadow puppetry shaped coffeehouse culture in nineteenth-century Istanbul. The emergence of the modern European city in particular was linked to the development of both state-sponsored and independent theatre institutions; theatre and performance practices drew on the human proximity that city living made possible, and shaped the visions of cultural heterogeneity that emerged from urban cohabitation. Today, unprecedented dynamics of migration, globalization, and rapid gentrification are fundamentally changing theatre’s role in the urban environment. However, theatre and performance practice are all but absent from urban studies. In turn, theatre and performance scholarship often views the urban question through a limited analytic lens.
Combining multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, THEAGENT will focus on the key cities of London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Istanbul to analyze the complicated and often contradictory relationship between theatre practices and urban transformation in twenty-first-century Europe. Following key thematic threads like migration and memory, the project’s original case studies will illustrate the diversity of urban transformation across the European continent, as well as the complex roles that theatre and performance practices play in producing urban subjectivities and structuring the cultural politics of gentrification. Groundbreaking in its use of theatre as its vantage point, THEAGENT will demonstrate that theatre is central to understanding the cultural politics of contemporary urban transformation. Similarly, the global city and its new productive economies are central to understanding contemporary theatre.