Abstracts
Iulia Popovici (RO) - Mistrusting One Another: How Documentary Theatre Reads the Community
„Aw, this show is so touching“ – writes a Facebook user about Sebastian’s Great Love, a reading/ performance based on the diary of an inter-war Romanian-Jewish novelist and playwright. In another internet debate, a documentary theatre performance dealing with the ecologically and politically hot...
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Joachim Fiebach (D) - Laying Bare Realities
My objective is to weigh the complexities and, perhaps, unsurmountable difficulty of doing performances that might sharpen or, in many cases activate at all or at least re-activate a critical gaze towards, in short to an insight into causes and the effects of the catastrophic mess the...
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Thomas Irmer (DE) - New Documentary Theatre in Perspective
I use the term New Documentary Theatre in order to differentiate it from older, established forms of documentary theatre which are based on theatrical models following strategies that are fundamentally different in relation to the subject explored and its representations. These...
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Hilary Halba and Stuart Young - Proposed Titles for Recycling Reality on Stage
How?
Remodelling reality: an approach to staging verbatim theatre.
This would discuss the approach to documentary theatre that we have pioneered, drawing variously on the techniques of Alecky Blythe and Anna Deavere Smith. From the former we use the device of...
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David Schwartz (RO) - I Declare at My Own Risk. Raising self-esteem and facilitating self-representation.
The presentation will focus on three aspects: the historical, social and political context of the Roma community in Romania; the process of developing a theatre monologue from personal facts and stories; and the political impact of personal-history-based solo-performance, both on the Roma...
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Péter P. Müller (HU) - Fact and fiction, document and fantasy – is there a difference, and does it matter at all?
Western thinking based mostly on fixed dichotomies, often structured in binary oppositions tend to make and/or see sharp differences between spheres which in other cultures (e.g. in the East), in other times (e.g. ancient history), and in traditional popular culture have not been separated from...
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Kornélia Deres (HU) - Whose story and why? Documentary theatre and its protagonists.
Although documentary theatre has not become a popular genre in contemporary Hungarian theatre, the few examples still raise the question: whose stories are being represented in these productions? Or: whose stories are interesting and important enough in a given socio-cultural context to...
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Natalia Jakubova (HU/RU) - Document versus postmemory: Controversies of dealing with the past in the contemporary Central European Theatre.
Summary
Marianne Hirsch proposed the term of ‘postmemory’ to describe the relationship of so called ‘second generation’ (children of Holocaust survivors) “to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to...
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Daria Fehérová (SK) - Natural and artificial ways of remembering Slovak history
Documentary drama does not have a real tradition in Slovakia. Many plays from the socialistic times deformed reality to back up ideology. New tendencies, which tried to realistically picture the history, came only slowly. After 1989 we even talk about the stagnation or crisis of Slovak...
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Mikhail Durnenkov (RU) - Ignorance as a Research Method in Documentary Projects
The role of the playwright in the documentary projects is not obvious. Apparently, the playwright serves as editor of the documents, the one who devises the idea and theme of the project in its development. From my personal experience and involvement in various documentary projects, I...
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