The 12^th International Conference of
	ISSEI	In cooperation With
	International Society for the Study of European Ideas

Section IV: Literature, Art, Music, Theatre, Culture

Workshop: Theatre and Utopia

Chair: Maya Nanitchkova Öztürk

This session seeks to engender discussion over the socio-cultural functions of theatre in correlation with a broad account of ‘utopian’ ideas, especially in view of philosophical and sociological frameworks on modernity and subjectivity. Theatre -- a multi-facetted art form that evolves as both construct and product of society -- presents a rich field to probe into the intricate linkages of art with theoretical and speculative thought, and discern various means through which ideas and ideals of self-hood and togetherness are construed, incorporated, and disseminated in theatrical praxis. That a collective questioning of social paradigms lies at the core of theatre would be evident, on the one hand, in regard of the literary text -- revolving around the status of the individual, the nature of relations and the very principles implicated in different conceptions (such as unity, homogenized entity, or assemblage). On the other, embedded in the specifically theatrical modes of community constituted at performance, the persistence of the theatre form as a model for social space, sacred and secular, would provide insight into the social significance of collective phenomena – practices and sensibilities - that would be sustained and cultivated in its corporeality. A focus on theatrical production, too, would allow tracing how codes and conventions, the interpretative work pertinent to directorship, staging techniques or performance practices reverberate with subsequent, and distinct beliefs, such as those in the ‘scientific’ logic, and the transparency to observation of the formation of the individual through socio-cultural circumstances, or in the utilization of psychoanalytical frameworks as technologies of self-constitution.

In a wider perspective, hence, the very endurance of theatre could be construed as a quest for agency, re-producing, in the guise of play, frameworks of reference for thinking, feeling and action in a mode of knowing that is wholesome – entailing self-knowledge, ethics, dialectical and speculative thought. It would express the faith in the capacity of the theatrical apparatus to elicit and restore the affective as a drive to productive change, both through representation in fiction and through the disruptive confrontation with specifically theatrical phenomena (corpsing, fiasco, laughter) – the invigorating experience of the performative event. Thus renditions of how theatre functions as a mental and material prop through which cultural schema and identities, ideas/ideals of agency and community are formed, and transformed in the context of performance, would also be relevant to inquiry into the culture of ‘utopia’.

Maya Nanitchkova Öztürk (Ph D)

Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture,

Bilkent University

06800 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey

e-mail: omaya@bilkent.edu.tr

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