Nordic Theatre Studies

Utopia and Performance

Meike Wagner — 2023-12-19

Speculative Geographies and the Horizons of Performance Studies

Sean Metzger — 2023-12-19

This essay examines performance in relation to speculative geographies, a term suggesting the search for and/or creation of worlds at once underdetermined and subject to the imagination. These endeavors might be utopic in the sense of envisioning new social formations or dystopic in the sense of connoting the effects of resource extraction and financial speculation. Building on a speculative geography called the Chinese Atlantic (based on a book of that name), the essay proceeds to elaborate Chinese transnational circulations in the Nordic region with an emphasis on the Arctic. In this vein, the Chinese Arctic is offered as another speculative geography that brings into focus emergent relationalities: between individuals, between nation-states, between human and non-human actants. These relationalities create the potential for social transformation at various scales with both life affirming and life negating effects.
Divided into six parts, the essay provides a survey on which to scaffold future research. The first part explains the genealogy of the analytical frame it offers and indicates how the writing in terms of both style and content is meant to function. The second situates speculative geographies in relation to selected writings on utopias. The third highlights selected performances that might serve as an antecedent to a Chinese Arctic paradigm. The fourth continues this move with an emphasis on Chinese investment in the energy and transportation sectors of Nordic countries as well as some of the soft power moves to support these efforts. The fifth section discusses the implications of speculative geographies as hyperobjects. The conclusion returns to events that generated the article and the implications for utopic thinking.

The Magic of Presence

Willmar Sauter — 2023-12-19

Every habitual visitor remembers some magic moments of theatrical events: a striking feeling of immediate presence. What are these experiences of presence about? What triggers them, under which circumstances do they take place? This text is an attempt to point out some decisive parameters that facilitate strong experiences of performative situations. On the basis of a new rhombic model, I will show how these parameters coordinate the senses of the beholder and create magic moments of presence. Then, presence remains as future memories of the past.

When the Utopian Performative Encounters Beauty

Daria Skjoldager-Nielsen — 2023-12-19

I remember the first time I came across the utopian performative: the butterflies in my stomach, the overwhelming feeling of hope and happiness it produced. Jill Dolan [2005] points to those moments during performances when the audience comes together and feels hopeful; moments that constitute inspiration for change: for the performer, the spectator, and maybe even the world – and which are often (understandably) politically or socially charged.
But my experiences were different: my feeling of hope was not emerging after watching a political vision of the future, but during and after my encounters with beauty. I began to wonder: can a profound sense of beauty that brings the feeling of hope and love, also have the potential to change the world?
In this article, I explore the aesthetics of the theatrical event and its effectiveness in bringing out utopian performatives. Theoretically, I draw on Erika Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetics of the performative to show how the language of performance analysis can access a theatrical (aesthetic) experience and on the theory of affect in performance to understand my experience; also, I supplement Dolan’s theory with Dorthe Jørgensen’s experience of beauty to extend her thinking into non-political experiences and grasping them more fully.
As an example, I discuss Oratorium Dance Project (Lodz 2011).

Cause of Death: Lähiö

Sanni Lindroos — 2023-12-19

As geographically and socially marginalized neighbourhoods, Finnish lähiös are associated with urban segregation and a set of stereotypes about their residents. Claiming to portray everyday life in the lähiö, in 2018, Turku City Theatre premiered a musical theatre production Varissuo, which was set in the city’s largest and most multicultural housing unit. This article investigates how Varissuo was constructed and depicted both on stage and beyond the stage by analyzing several characters and their storylines, as well as material details present in the theatre building’s lobby area. Drawing from Richard Dyer’s notion of stereotypes as a product of assumed consensuses about specific social groups, the article first focuses on plotting how both novelistic and stereotypical characters contributed to an understanding of the lähiö as a locus of ill-being and personal struggle. Critically approaching Jill Dolan’s conceptual utopian performatives, the article then discusses the elements of utopia and dystopia in Varissuo, suggesting that the representation of the lähiö on stage and in the theatre building erased political potential of the utopian performatives and subverted them into a counterproductive force. I argue that the utilization of lähiö stereotypes and Varissuo’s detachment from its real-life origins potentially contributes to further stigmatization and polarization between social groups

“Ready to fly with a lust for life”

Ragnhild Tronstad — 2023-12-19

The Cultural Schoolbag (TCS) is a national programme designed to provide all school pupils in Norway access to professional art and culture. On average three times a year, in their school time, children and youth get to experience art and culture in various forms, spanning literature, film, music, visual arts, cultural heritage, theatre, and dance. To build and maintain Norway as a democracy is an explicit aim of the programme. Securing all children and youth equal access to professional art and culture regardless of geography, economy, religious or cultural background is but one aspect of its democratic scope. Also important is the belief that being exposed to art and culture is instrumental in educating future citizens who are able, ready, and willing to take active part in a democratic society. Reflecting this rather utopian vision of TCS, the county municipality of Vestfold used to launch their TSC programme under the motto: “Livslysten og flyvedyktig”, in English; “Ready to fly with a lust for life”.
In what sense, however, do these utopian rationales influence the programme that is offered in the schools? How, exactly, may performance events and theatre experienced in TCS contribute to bringing up citizens that are “ready to fly with a lust for life”?
Presenting an outline of current ideological, cultural political, and educational discourses surrounding TCS, this study addresses how, and to what extent, political and educational guidelines have an impact on its artistic programme. Offering two recent TCS productions as examples, I discuss how the utopian spaces provided by these theatre and performance events prepare the grounds for enactment and reflection that may take performative effect in influencing the lives and futures of the participating children and youth.

Building an Ideal Theatre

Anneli Saro — 2023-12-19

Throughout the course of theatre history, many actors and directors have dreamt about an ideal theatre. Many young European theatre makers in the twenty-first century have preferred working in their own groups with like-minded colleagues instead of joining big institutional theatres or have tried to revolutionize the institutions.
Dwelling on theoretical arguments about the terms “ideal”, “idealism”, and “utopia” in theatre, the article investigates what are the ideals of contemporary theatre makers, which ideals/utopias are realizable in theatre practice and how. To answer these questions, the case study of Estonian theatre NO99 is used. In 2004, Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper became the leaders of the state funded theatre Vanalinnastuudio and tried to reorganize it into an ideal theatre. The article investigates what were the ideals of the theatre makers of the NO99, how their ideals were realized, which ideals endured, and which ones failed during the fourteen years. Finally, a discussion on the developments of theatre institutions in the twenty-first century will be presented.

Hen: Queer Puppet Cabaret, Utopian Perspectives for Sexual Bodies

Antoine Hirel — 2023-12-19

Named after the gender-neutral Swedish pronoun, Hen is a queer puppet show, created and performed by the French artist Johanny Bert. In this performance, the body of the puppet, made of wood, foam and, fabric, is used like a “jigsaw” - assembling different pieces together in order to create and reveal a form, an image, a meaning. It becomes the material for a new vision of how we conceive and construct the body, as it deconstructs essentializing, binary, heteronormative identities, envisioning greater possibilities and pluralities of bodies. Through the vision of non-human object in the space of a theatre, Johanny Bert unveils and rethinks the relationship sexuality and society maintain together by showing sexuality as a theatrical utopia where new forms of bodies and desires can be revealed. Guided by an interdisciplinary approach combining both Gender Studies and Visual Studies, this article talks about how the plasticity of the puppetting object can affect the perception of our own bodies. How and where does the show Hen manifest utopia for the human body and sexuality? Johanny Bert puts the concept of anthropomorphism as the threshold for questioning human sexuality into the theatre and challenges the ways we define and circumscribe bodies and desires, inviting new perspectives for sexual and corporeal paradigms, too.

Utopian Realism

Maria Mårsell — 2023-12-19

Around the turn of the nineteenth century writer, and opinion leader, Frida Stéenhoff (1865–1945), developed a theory of the future and the present of society, and argued that contemporary ideas of the social, ethical, and aesthetical were provisional, not comparable to the coming. An affinity between drama and theory, as well as investigations of peace as an idea, are distinctive features of her writing. Her play, Stridbar ungdom / Pugnacious Youth (1907), can be positioned in a tradition of peace dramas spanning from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to Sarah Kane’s Blasted. This article studies the utopian potential of peace in Pugnacious Youth. By reading the play with Ruth Levitas’ method the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (IROS) – suggesting that utopia is a method rather than a goal in itself – peace does not emerge negatively, as non-war, but as concrete development and possible presence. Furthermore, the division between realism and idealism when it comes to militarism and peace, as well as the realist and idealist branches of the peace movement, are problematized. In conclusion, it appears that studying ideas of peace in fiction enables an alternative entry into the actualization of its not-yet-here quality.

Late Nineteenth-Century Radical Utopias in Theatre Reviews

Birgitta Lindh Estelle — 2023-12-19

Anne Charlotte Leffler’s Sanna Kvinnor (True Women 1883) is one of many gender-critical plays by Swedish women playwrights during the 1880s which linger in the shadows of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Sanna kvinnor certainly asks for a change of the prevailing gender norms in the 1880s, in other words, for a transformation into a better world, but how was this utopian drive staged at the theatres and how was it received by the theatre critics? By taking the theoretical point of departure in Slavoj Žižek’s notion of a radical utopia (2003), the aim of my article is to illuminate the reviewers’ perception of the stagings in the first production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in 1883 and in Albert Ranft’s touring production 1884–86. My archival sources mainly consist of reviews from which both the stagings and the reviewers’ reactions will be traced through a systematic method developed from the semiotics of Jurij Lotman.

Hamlet and Its Danish Double. The Historical Performance as Medium for a Utopian Monarchy

Annelis Kuhlmann — 2023-12-19

The first Hamlet production in Danish, performed 1813 at The Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, went through substantial cuts and changes in the text. The re-cycling of sets from other performances were used in the production of Hamlet and turned the reworked version of Hamlet into a negotiation of the utopian heroic vision of the Danish monarchy, despite its painful bloody conflicts of power. It is my point, that this production of Hamlet, by the dramaturgical choices made, became, what I would determine as, a plain “theatricality” of the play and with the desire for a peaceful future without conflicts. The invisibility of Shakespeare’s “utopia” was transformed into an almost theatricalized “anti-utopia” or dystopia in this production with an affinity for melodrama. How seemingly strange and paradoxical this dramaturgy was, the production of the first Danish Hamlet paved the way for a historically very long stylized form of reality in its impact on the long ninetieth century Danish theatre history. The theatrical way of thinking, as embedded in Shakespeare’s play, was adopted into a theatre mentality where dreams would echo the idea of the Royal interest and taste, leaving an impression of conform aesthetics. The dramaturgical choices from 1813 lasted until the time when Henrik Ibsen’s naturalist plays would have their opening nights at the very same Royal Danish Theatre.