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 accompanied 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’s objective is to 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.
Starting Hypothesis and Preliminary Observations:
THEAGENT argues that understanding the relationship between theatre and gentrification requires a three-pronged approach that encapsulates theatre’s material and symbolic dimensions. 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,
• Theaters 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. These theatrical representations depict the city in relation to the 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 city marketing, as well as in the practices of consumption that they promote. Conversely, other theaters 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.
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 respond to changes in centralized visions for the theatre, including new funding structures explicitly sponsoring theatre and performance practices responsive to changing urban situations.
