Amphitheater journal
\nInternational scientific symposium<\/p>\n
7 and 8 October 2021, Slovenian Theatre Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia<\/p>\n
Throughout history playwriting and theatre have been caught in an impossible relationship in which they seem to be constantly struggling for dominance, while each of them appears to be unable to exist without the other one. This can be noted as early as in Aristotle’s Poetics<\/em>, where the great philosopher argued that \u00bbthe power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors\u00ab. Nevertheless, the rise of tragedy was essentially bound to theatre and rituals in honour of the god Dionisus which represented an important element of the Athenian polis. We will not however be dealing with the entire history of this relationship, but rather the changes it has undergone during the last 20 years, as it would appear that we are witnessing a revival of playwriting in Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe.<\/p>\n We have already addressed the renaissance of playwriting in the wake of the so-called ‘in yer face’ theatre which emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1990’s and affected the development of drama throughout Europe. On the other hand, as early as in the late 1960’s the so-called performative turn (a term coined by Erika Fischer-Lichte) took place in the development of theatre, which later influenced the emergence of postdramatic theatre (Lehman) or the new aesthetics of the performative (\u00c4sthetik des Performativen) (Fischer-Lichte), while in the area of playwriting it brought about no-longer-dramatic texts (Gerda Poschmann) or post-dramatic texts in the 1980’s.<\/p>\n After the turn of the millenium a new style of writing for theatre started to be discerned, mainly in German literary theory and theatre studies: the so-called ‘dramatisches Drama’ or ‘dramatic drama’, as Birgit Haas designated it. This encompasses theatre texts which again tend to build more heavily upon dialogue and discernible and at least partly coherent drama plot, while they are at the same time characterised by emphatic political or socially engaged points. At the same time new designations for drama playwriting began to emerge, e.g. neo-drama (Anne Monfort) or post-post-dramatic theatre (\u00c9lisabeth Angel-Perez), in which authors maintain their presence through lyrisation or episation. Thus contemporary drama exposes us to a deconstruction of the opposition between presentation and representation, while at the same time establishing a strong process of re-dramatisation, the injection of drama and the dramatic into the post-dramatic tissue of plays, despite disturbances of the fictional universe and parallel to it.<\/p>\n 1. What characteristics of the form and content of drama can be discerned in Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe after the year 2000?<\/p>\n 2. What are the causes and influences on the development of playwriting after the year 2000?<\/p>\n 3. The forms of dramatis personae in contemporary drama and the question of dramatic genres.<\/p>\n 4. What is the relationship between drama and theatre performance in contemporary theatre?<\/p>\n 5. Who are the most prominent authors of contemporary drama and what poetics do they adhere to?<\/p>\n 6. What is the reception of contemporary drama like?<\/p>\n 7. Do literary theory and criticism dispose of appropriate tools for the analysis of such texts? Is it necessary to resort to insights and tools from other fields due to the changed nature of this type of drama and its interconnections with inscenation principles?<\/p>\n 8. Can we (still) argue that drama is in a crisis?<\/p>\n 9. What is the role of the author in drama after the year 2000?<\/p>\n 10. What tactics and strategies does contemporary drama employ when faced with social challenges?<\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe questions we want to address in the planned simposium are as follows:<\/h5>\n