Theatre and Performance Studies News

Congratulations to Alice Golisano who has been awarded the Warwick-Paris Seine co-tutelle EUTOPIA scholarship. Alice will be joining us in September 2019.

Bio

Alice has a BA in Translation Studies from the University of Genova, Italy and graduated in January 2018 with her MA in the arew nad Perfomrance Research at the University of Warwick/

About the PhD project:

The working title of the PhD is 'International theatre festivals as means of building European cohesion and a form of resistance against the populist drift', and it wants to explore the political and ‘diplomatic’ role of European Theatre Festivals, taking the Festival d’Avignon, the SibFest, the Bitef, and the RomaEuropa Festival as case studies. My claim is that European International Theatre Festivals are examples of those third spaces that Foucault labels as ‘heterotopia’, hybrid spaces that act as ‘worksites for democracy’, places of symbolic and physical contact between cultures, where a process of cohesion and (re)building can commence. I will question if international theatre festivals can be regarded as worksites for democracy, when much of its values are being lost in the recent rise of populism. If they can take up an active role as cultural mediators and promote a feeling of Europeanness outside the EU geopolitical borders. And whether the technocratic EU could rely more on such international events to promote cohesion during times of membership negotiations and disagreements regarding the different migration policies. By putting in dialogue the analysis of performances and curatorial choices of different European Theatre Festivals with current political theories on nationality, European identity and belonging, this project aims to contribute to the field of cultural diplomacy and help generating new ways of thinking about the approach to matters of international interest not solely in a strictly political way.