Projekttagung WRITING THEATER Qualitative Methods, Situated Knowledge, and the Making of Performance

July 5–7, 2023
Institute for Theater Studies, LMU Munich
Conference location: Studio Stage (Studiobühne) of the Institute for Theater Studies, Neuturmstrasse 5, 80331 Munich

The production of performance has gained renewed attention in recent years. Artistic processes in theaters have come into focus, as have their social foundations, institutional frameworks and material entanglements.

This has led to an increased adaptation of methodologies from the social sciences. In particular, qualitative methods, most prominently praxeological and ethnographical approaches, have opened up new ways of engaging with theater.

But the expansion of the methodological toolbox is not just that. It reinvents epistemological relations and has lasting repercussions for the subjects and objects of research. While theater scholars have traditionally found themselves within the dispositif of theater as spectators confronting the performance, the move backstage and elsewhere equates to a loss of this privileged position and inevitably leads to an epistemological decentering of performance.

This in turn provokes a closer look at the practices of research: techniques of description (protocols) and inscription (photographs, recordings) come to the fore, as do the diverse social and material agents that are mobilized to turn fleeting observations into reliably defined and delimited subjects of knowledge.

Accordingly, the aim of the conference is, on the one hand, to discuss ethnographical strategies in the domain of theater studies, including their epistemological repercussions. On the other hand, it is to take a look back at established writing strategies, taking inspiration from the rich body of critical self-reflection in ethnography: What happens to theater when scholars move backstage, and what can we learn from there about our scholarly selves?

For more information visit: https://www.ulf-otto.de/en/tagung-writing-theater-5-7-juli-2023/

The conference is part of the research project »The Art of Crafts: A Praxeography of the Theater Apparatus.«
https://www.ulf-otto.de/en/die-kunst-der-gewerke/

Concept and realization: Ulf Otto, Luise Barsch, Anna Raisich
Collaboration: Lee Redepenning, Johannes Romann

Participation is free of charge.
Registration until June 28, 2023 under: gewerke@lrz.uni-muenchen.de.