The Art of the Workshop: A Praxeography of the Theatrical Apparatus

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulf Otto
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495812292

Theater is traditionally understood as an essentially social art, and in recent years it has increasingly come under scrutiny from both micro- and macrosociological perspectives. However, little attention has so far been paid to the socio-technical dimension of theater. For it is precisely the trades and operations, thanks to which aesthetic processes in theater are essentially intertwined with material culture and technical infrastructure, that remain relegated to subordinate tools within the framework of a hylomorphistic conception of art that categorically separates art from technology. The project therefore aims at a theoretical rehabilitation of theater as apparatus through an empirical investigation of practices of production, and thus not least of the people, machines, and materials in the trades of theater. In three closely linked subprojects, the art of theater is observed in everyday operations, in the very places and activities in which it is not usually situated: (a) in the production of objects in the workshops, (b) in the management of resources in the operating offices, (c) in the coordination of processes in the technical rooms. Following the things, bodies, and signs that pass through these places, tracing their paths, as well as the changes and entanglements they undergo along the way, the project inquires into the indissoluble interrelationship of the semiotic, the material, and the social in the articulation of aesthetic propositions-at the very moment when these processes are exposed to fundamental transformation due to current technological change. This is connected with an epistemic change of perspective from the auditorium to the backstage of the theater, which methodically approaches procedures of cultural anthropology, but closely links them with a historical and theoretical perspective. The decisive point of reference is therefore not so much ethnography as a praxeography in the sense of Annemarie Mol, whose empirical philosophy is in the tradition of Actor-Network-Theory (Latour) and (feminist) Science and Technology Studies (Haraway). Thus, the project aims not least at a decentering of the concept of performance and the theatrical formulation of a concept of posthuman performativity (Barad), which is interdisciplinary connectable, reacts to recent upheavals and proposes a new materialism of the performative.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants