Project description
When urban transformation takes centre stage
The development of the modern European city was intertwined with the rise of both state-sponsored and independent theatre institutions. But what is the role of theatre in the 21st-century city? The ERC-funded THEAGENT project argues that theatre is key to understanding the cultural politics of contemporary urban transformation. In turn, the global city and its new productive economies are key to understanding contemporary theatre. THEAGENT will develop these claims by focusing on theatre writ large, including theatre-going as a practice of urban subject formation, the aesthetic medium as a space for representing the urban, and the theatre itself as an institution. Combining ethnographic and archival research, the project will explore how theatre has shaped (and been shaped by) gentrification in five European metropoles.
Objective
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 importance in the urban environment. Theatre and performance practices are all but absent from urban studies, however, and theatre scholarship often views the urban question through a limited analytic lens.
Combining multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, this interdisciplinary research project will focus on the key cities of London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Istanbul to analyze the complicated and often ambivalent relationship between theatre practices and urban transformation in twenty-first-century Europe. Following key thematic threads like migration and memory, Theatre and Gentrification’s original case studies will illustrate the diversity of property relations and housing tenure 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, this ambitious project will change the way we think about the contradictions of culture in the twenty-first century city, from its role in securing claims to global urban stature, to its position within imaginaries of authentic local resistance.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
1010 Wien
Austria