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

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 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 the 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”.