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.
The THEAGENT team consists of five core researchers, including the Principal Investigator and four Postdoctoral Fellows, each of whom is responsible for conducting research in one of the five cities. Our project consortium includes the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama of the University of London, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, and the American University of Paris. Our project team is now comprised of international members from Austria, Poland, Germany, France, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Starting Hypothesis:
THEAGENT argues that understanding the relationship between theatre and gentrification requires a three-pronged approach that encapsulates theatre’s material and symbolic economies. We focus on:
Theatre-going as a practice of urban subject formation,
The aesthetic medium as a space for the creation and circulation of novel representations of the urban,
Theatres themselves as social institutions and creative arts enterprises.
Preliminary investigation using this three-pronged approach reveals a number of trends:
1) In each of the five cities in question, theatre and performance practices from the past twenty-five years track fundamental changes in the representation of the urban environment, including changes in the articulation of claims to urban belonging and property ownership, resistance to experiences of urban exclusion and displacement, and emerging imaginaries of urban history. Across the five cities in question, these theatrical representations depict the city in relation to the key themes of memory, migration, property, and publicness.
2) In each of the five cities in question, theatre institutions are materially embedded in processes of urban transformation. Some are located in neighborhoods that have experienced rapid gentrification and are themselves participants in this process, often through the role they play in securing a given city’s claim to global urban stature, as well as in the practices of consumption that they promote. Conversely, other theatres either themselves fall prey to processes of urban displacement or their explicit mandate is to take part in practices of local/political resistance to gentrification. Importantly, however, aesthetic representation and lived reality are often discontinuous, resulting in contradictory, and at times paradoxical relationships between theatres and gentrification.
3) In each of the five cities in question, theatre institutions and their artistic and everyday practices are shaped in relation to changing cultural and municipal policy discourses. Theatre administrations (including units dedicated to marketing and public relations) respond to changes in centralized visions for the theatre, including new funding structures explicitly sponsoring theatre and performance practices responsive to changing urban situations. In some cases, the relationship between theatre administrations and administrators in cultural funding institutions develop much more symbiotically.