Theater/Performance Historiography: A Preamble
Michal Kobialka
kobia001@umn.eduUniversity of Minnesota (United States)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6698-4140
Abstract
The introduction to the issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny which gestures towards current work on theater/performance historiography published in the Anglo-American academe. Reflecting on insights about the complex nature and the mediality of historical knowledge, we would like to offer a collection of essays which, in their singularity, draw attention to internal contradictions prompted by tensions between 1) time, space, and matter, which are used to frame academic practices, and 2) events and objects, which are determined historically not only by past and present imaginations but also by how time, space, and matter function within the field of theater/performance historiography. We ask the following questions: How are we to think about the ways of housing the past (the archive, the event, the object) and the experience of the past (time, space, matter)? How are we to think about historiography in ways that are not only not dualistic (e.g., self and other, mainstream and margin), but that facilitate seeing historical subjects as unsettled by (rather than settled in) time, as riddled with contradictions (rather than reflective of a status quo), and as constructs of meaning (rather than as regulated thought)? And finally, how are we to negotiate the dynamics and the contradictions between multiple temporalities and spatialities housed in one and the same object or event?
Keywords:
theater historiography, temporalities, spatialities, mediality of knowledgeReferences
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Authors
Michal Kobialkakobia001@umn.edu
University of Minnesota United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6698-4140
Michal Kobialka is Professor of Theatre in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Minnesota. He has published over 100 articles, essays, and reviews on medieval, eighteenth-century, and contemporary European theatre, as well as theatre historiography in the North American, South American, and European journals. He is the author of Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (2009) and This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (1999). He is the editor of A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990 by Tadeusz Kantor (1993) and Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory (1999); and a co-editor (with Barbara Hanawalt) of Medieval Practices of Space (2000); (with Rosemarie Bank) of Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (2015) and (with Natalia Zarzecka) of Tadeusz Kantor’s Memory: Other Pasts, Other Futures (2018).
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