Theater and Archive: Theatricality in Erlangen as Interplay between Court, City, and University

• Applicants: Dr. Hans-Friedrich Bormann; Dr. Dorothea Pachale; Professor Dr. Clemens Risi
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 520768780

The history of theater in Erlangen is defined by a specific interplay between the institutions of the court, city, and university. Based on a general methodological reflection on the relationship between performance practices and archival practices, this research project investigates significant constellations and key events in theater historiography in four subprojects, each of which focuses on different facets of theatrical practices in Erlangen and on different time periods from the eighteenth century to the present. To this end, the project draws, on the one hand, on the model of “interlacing theatricalities”, which has been developed by Rudolf Münz and others and which makes it possible to relate different structural types of theater to one another. In doing so, the project turns attention to both diachronic developments and synchronic constellations of different forms of theater in the context of Erlangen’s (courtly and bourgeois) urban society. On the other hand, the project makes a fundamental contribution to methodological reflections in theater studies. Its point of departure is the ambivalent relationship of theater to the materiality of documents and, in particular, to the practice of collecting. Here, the project links to recent discussions in theater studies and archive theory and examines and develops them further on the basis of concrete, locally oriented theater and archival practices. The archive thus serves not only as an epistemological instrument but itself becomes as part of interlacing urban theatricalities an object of reflection. The aim of the project is, first, to elaborate and reflect on mechanisms immanent to the archive that constitute and structure the field of theater in the first place. Second, this archival-critical approach serves to interpret the sources kept in various archives with regard to the constellation of interlacing theatricalities in Erlangen.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants