Vortrag vom 11. Juni 2024

Starting from Marianne Van Kerkhoven’s ideas about micro and macro dramaturgy, the lecture explores the notion of curating beyond staging performances and shaping a repertoire and examines how festivals are creating “cultural gathering spaces” (J. Applebaum) and “spaces for dialogue” (H. Perry) outside the walls of their building, venturing into site-responsive, process-focussed, and interdisciplinary practices. For illustrating this move from product to process, from consumption of art to civil participation in local issues of concern, the lecture presents examples from the work of two festivals from the Nordic region of Europe. Based on research interviews – with art curator Taru Elfving, whose special interests are research-based practices, participatory and process-based approaches; Trevor Davis, director of Metropolis (Copenhagen), an “art-based metropolitan laboratory for the performative, site-specific, international art”, organised by Københavns Internationale Teater (KIT) which creates “temporary, mobile spaces”; and Hanna Parry, artistic director of Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival, who initiated the festival’s nature restoration project in Ähtäri in collaboration with climate and rewilding expert Snowchange Cooperative – the lecture seeks to find out what the guiding ideas and principles behind this new type of work are and how they are framed within an art festival.

Katalin Trencsényi (HU/UK) is an award-winning dramaturg, theatre-maker and researcher. Her areas of research are new- and expanded dramaturgies, dance dramaturgy, comparative dramaturgy, women and theatre, and political theatre. As a London-based dramaturg, Katalin has worked with the National Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre, Corali Dance Company, Deafinitely Theatre and with many independent artists. Katalin is the author of Dramaturgy in the Making. A User’s Guide for Theatre Practitioners (2015); editor of Bandoneon: Working with Pina Bausch (2016); co-editor of New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice (2014); and a contributor to several volumes and professional journals. Currently, Katalin is working as a lecturer on the Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research programme at the University of the Arts Helsinki.