Theatricality & the Political

This course addresses the articulation between theatricality and the political from a cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective. From the Renaissance theater to the profuse baroque, to the modernizing logics and aesthetics, to so-called “neo-baroque”, the course addresses logics and grammars within past and present dramaturgies of the social. How do certain theatrical traditions articulate with various power formations? How do these connect and complicate the relation between power and resistance, colonialism and liberation, center and periphery, particular and universal, actors and audiences? What technical apparatuses, cultural structures, ethical dispositions and bodily repertoires are mobilized? And how do old and new media technologies reconfigure protocols of stage-form in ancient and contemporary political theater?