A Site for Secret Memories. Theatre in State-Socialism
A Site for Secret Memories. Theatre in State-Socialism

Summary/Abstract: In my lecture, I will present a research project that has created a methodology to reconstruct the theatrical events of the last 70 years. I was motivated by the recognition that the methodology of theatrical historiography prepares a web of interconnected past events based on stories of institutions and artists, and this historiography presents us with solid lines of processes.The cultural events of state-socialism are difficult to follow with this historiographical process-analysis, as the narratives that keep them in the memory are also censored narratives themselves, and the rewriting, losing a counterfeiting of the memories present us with a double history: the sites of memory of the official public sphere and those that remained from the local interpersonal spaces, or the "secondary public sphere".The analysis of the theatrical performance writes a micro-history, based on the reconstruction of aesthetic values, and it achieves the perception and understanding of secret, hidden interrelations and rewritten phenomena by the impact-analysis of the events.The reconstruction of the theatrical performance is not simply an interrogation of the past: it is an investigation. The memory of a performance is made visible through and among the reports of agents and informers, and resolutions of censors. The aim of my lecture is to present our collective method called “Philther”.

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