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A Transnational Community of Scholars: The Theatre Historiography Working Group in IFTR/FIRT1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2010

THOMAS POSTLEWAIT  and
BARBARA SUŠEC MICHIELI
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Abstract

The history of the Theatre Historiography Working Group in IFTR/FIRT provides a case study of how and why the Federation has been transformed by its working groups during the last two decades. Founded in 1992, the historiography group has developed into one of the largest and most active in IFTR/FIRT. Over the last nineteen years, the members of the group, drawn from many of the countries in the Federation, have used the annual meetings to develop a diverse and often challenging scholarship on the history of theatre (broadly defined). By focusing on the basic issues in historiography, the participating scholars have refined their research and writing methods. Moreover, the essays and books, published in several languages, have contributed to major transformations in the methods and topics in performance history. The working group, besides serving as a transnational community for historical scholarship, has also contributed to revisionist methods in the teaching of theatre history in dozens of countries, especially during the last decade.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , October 2010 , pp. 232 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2010

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Footnotes

1

The authors wish to offer a most generous thank you to Jim Davis, University of Warwick, for his guidance, from start to finish, on this essay. We also extend our gratitude to the members of the Theatre Historiography Working Group, a number of whom provided vital historical documentation for the writing of this article and the compilation of the appendix.

References

NOTES

2 The IFTR meeting at Glasgow University took place on 16–23 September 1985. It was the tenth World Congress. Claude Schumacher (Glasgow University) served as an organizer. After this meeting, Schumacher edited a collection of conference papers called 40 Years of Mise en scène: 1945–1985, published in Dundee, Scotland, 1986. The book included keynote addresses by Giles Havergal, Charles Joris, and Christian le Guillochet. It also featured twenty-nine selected papers from the conference, distributed under several categories: ‘Directors and Designers’, ‘Middle Ages and Modernity’, ‘Directing the Classics’, ‘Modern Classics’, ‘Africa Today’, and ‘Avant-garde Theory and Practice’.

3 The Stockholm conference programme was divided into eight sections on broadly defined research topics: Perspectives on Theatre History, Integration of Music and Dance in Dramatic Performance, Performance Theory, Reception and Audience Research, Ethnic Studies of Performing Arts, Theatre Education for the Artist and Audience, Theatre in Society, and Communicating the Results of Theatre Research to the Public, Theatres, and Scholars.

4 Sauter, Willmar, ‘Theatre History vs. Theatre Today: Introductory Notes by the Editor’, in Sauter, Willmar, ed., New Directions in Theatre Research (special issue of Nordic Theatre Studies), Copenhagen, 1990, p. 9Google Scholar. This special issue featured selected papers from the World Congress, including some of the keynote addresses on both theatre historiography and performance analysis by R. W. Vince, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Martine de Rougemont and Henri Schoenmakers. Sauter also published a selection of theatre historiography papers by Frank Peeters, Thomas Postlewait, Michal Kobialka, John Astington, Susan Leigh Foster, Tracy C. Davis and Glen Gadberry. And, in turn, he featured performance analysis and reception papers by Sarah Bryant-Bertail, Jacqueline Martin, Peter Eversmann, Janelle Reinelt and Roger Deldime. He then concluded with a selection of papers on theatre and society by Wolfgang Greisenegger, Joachim Fiebach, Hélène Bouvier, Maria Luisa Torres Ryes, Jørn Langsted and Hans van Maanen. Collectively, the papers signalled many of the new developments in theatre scholarship.

5 Ron Vince, besides serving as a leader of one of the theatre history groups in Stockholm, also delivered an important keynote address on theatre historiography, which was subsequently published in Nordic Theatre Studies (1990). By 1989 Vince had become a leading scholar on theatre historiography. His books were proving to be a catalyst for change in the discipline, as the birth of working groups in IFTR demonstrated.

6 Postlewait announced to the University Commission of IFTR/FIRT on 3 October 1992 the existence of the Historiography Working Group, which had twenty potential members who ‘were anxious to continue their work, concentrating on the two areas of “contextualization” and “methodology”’. He also announced that the next meeting would be held in 1993 in Helsinki, with three organizers: himself (USA), Frank Peeters (Belgium) and Jean-Marc Larrue (Canada). See ‘Report of the University Commission’ for 3 October 1992, compiled by Michael Anderson, Secretary General, IFTR, pp. 1–2.

7 Seventeen possible working groups were identified in this report, most of which still lacked an organizer. The list was thus misleading – like many documents – for the catalogue of possible groups was little more than a wish list. The Federation was hoping to launch the new groups a year later at the 1994 World Congress in Moscow, but only a few came into being by then (e.g. theatre iconography; theatre scenography; cultural identities; feminist theatre/women in theatre; theatre as a social system; reception and audience research; acting, dancing and movement; comparative study of theatre and other media). Some died out quickly; others had to be reconceived in the coming years by new leadership within the groups. Still, step by step, in the 1990s over a dozen working groups established themselves, and others continued to be born during the following decade.

8 For the last two decades, one of the major challenges in the Federation has been the task of accommodating working groups in the schedule for the annual conference. Each conference organizer struggles over not only how much time to set aside for each of the working groups but also how to integrate the working groups into the normal six-day schedule of keynote addresses, plenary sessions, student and new-member groups and special events. Unfortunately, the working groups have sometimes been required to meet a day before or after the scheduled conference. This arrangement, which forces extra expenses on the working-group members, gives the groups a second-class status in the Federation.

9 ‘News from the boards’, FIRT/IFTR SIBMAS Bulletin, 21, 3 (1997), no page numbers.

10 McConachie, Bruce, ‘Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History’, Theatre Journal, 37 (1985), pp. 465–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 It is not surprising, therefore, to find the writings of various theorists in the bibliographies of theatre historians during the last two decades (e.g. the works of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Clifford Geertz, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Gramsci, Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco, Carlo Ginzburg, Raymond Williams, Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Le Goff).

12 The title of a meeting is always decided by consensus. The selection procedure is simple: every year at the concluding meeting, the working group responds to the specific points of discussion that emerged during that year's meeting, and then extracts these points as the basis for the following year's meeting. This approach enables a thematic continuity while also ensuring responsiveness to new and emerging topics.

13 The essayists from the working group are Bruce McConachie, Frank Peeters, Barbara Pušić (Sušec Michieli), Freddie Rokem, Yael Zarhy-Levo, Laurence Senelick, and Wilmer himself. They make up only half of the essayists in the book.

14 The working-group contributors included Jim Davis, Tom Postlewait, Jacky Bratton, Gilli Bush-Bailey, and Davis.

15 Jim Davis, email message of 10 March 2010.

16 Rosemarie Bank, email message of 27 April 2010.

17 The contributors included Rosemarie Bank, S. E. Wilmer, Yael Zarhy Levo, Jan Lazardzig, Jim Davis, Pirkko Koski, Helmar Schramm and Barbara Sušec Michieli.

18 Minutes of the Historiography Working Group Business Meeting, Helsinki, 7 and 12 August 2006 (taken by Kate Newey).