Strasbourg, 2022

ABSTRACT: Early modern theater is a political device. It represents and deconstructs power, it shapes identities, it embodies differences or censors them. It recreates a political world that the audience can embrace, reject or discuss. It negotiates crucial encounters with diverse others, between nations, cultures, races, epistemologies. It encourages the spectator to recognize, as Montaigne wrote, “in the fable on stage, the shadow and sign of the tragic plays of human fortune” .

Against the odds, theater brings us recognition, anagnorisis. This year TWB invites inquiries that will foster re-cognitions: rethinking, reorienting, and, possibly, revelation. Recognition through theater that extends and questions the self and the nations that delimit it. Recognition into theatrical spaces and fictions that are endangered by plague, racism, climate change, fascism. Recognition of the capital flows and power that feed and censor theater in all its forms. Recognition of the power of whiteness as default category of self in theater as usual, and the urgency of diversifying, indeed of fracturing, that monumental whiteness.

The contributions to the conference will focus on the theater of early modernity in its transnational dimension, in order to highlight the proximities and differences between the dramatic practices of each language and culture.