Employing methods from New Historicism and the empirical literary science, Gašper Troha investigates the corpus of Slovenian dramatic texts in the period 1943–1990 and examines them in regard to their relationship with the authorities. The research on the complex relationships between drama, theatre, the authorities and the public focuses on the question: why did the socialist authorities allow for the staging of dramatic texts and even award them (on festivals and elsewhere)? Using Slavoj Žižek’s theses on the fortification of social ties between the authorities and the people, the author creates a model of the fragile balance between the aforementioned actors, each of whom has completely different motivations for entering into these relationships. The scientific monograph also provides a historical overview of Slovenian drama in this period, building up its genre typology and on the basis of empirical data on the theatre audience examining its social impact.
COBISS.SI-ID: 85277185
Vitomil Zupan’s Sholion (1973), a collection of theatre essays, reflects on the state of drama and theatre in the early 1970s and outlines his vision of their future developmental trends, in which Zupan sees drama and theatre as the syntheses of several theatre genres: the theatre of the absurd, the total theatre and the so-called “realistic” theatre, as he himself terms it. Zupan uses this term to denote various approaches to performing that are the opposite of the theatre of the absurd and entail elements of social criticism, grotesque, comedy, satire, real situations and projections of ideas regarding the world. This article presents the fundamental ideas of Zupan’s “synthesis of tomorrow”, defining them theoretically and identifying their manifestations in his dramatic opus. In the special issue of the journal Jezik in slovstvo [Language and Literature] published to mark the 100-year anniversary of Vitomil Zupan’s birth and dedicated to his drama and theatre opus, the following members of the programme group contributed articles: Barbara Orel, Gašper Troha [COBISS.SI-ID 3873627] and Blaž Lukan [COBISS.SI-ID 3874395].
COBISS.SI-ID: 3865947
The article deals with the radio play The Return of Cortes by Andrej Hieng that was transformed seven years later into an opera libretto by composer Pavel Šivic. Through a comparative analysis of both texts and on the basis of Theodor Adorno’s theses about the bourgeois opera, the article reveals that the differences between the play and the libretto are a result of the demands of the opera genre.
COBISS.SI-ID: 58098274
What values do theatre and dance hold for audience members? And how do these values differ between subsidised, amateur and commercial performance? This paper addresses these questions through a survey of over 1,800 spectators for theatre and dance in Tyneside in northeastern England, as well as a parallel set of focus groups, in the spring of 2014. These methods, which are designed for comprehensiveness and comparability, are being used across Europe by the Project on European Theatre Systems, a working group of theatre sociologists. Our research showed two sets of values that performances achieved; one was a common measure of performance quality, while the other described the values particular to subsidised work. This allows us to articulate both the general value of the arts and the particular values which subsidy (attempts to) facilitate. This has implications for both understandings of cultural value and for cultural policy, as the distinction between the two groups was not clear. We also found that amateur theatre participated in the same value system, but with an increased emphasis on loyalty and community cohesion. The paper concludes with a methodological reflection on the use of quantitative methods in theatre studies.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3948379
A typical problem of many urban regeneration and redevelopment projects based on the economic potential of cultural or so-called creative industries, is the uneven social and spatial development of cities. In this chapter, the author confronts the concept of cultural or creative industries, very popular notions in the mainstream research writings of cultural politics, with a more universal concept of “the right to the city”. Two outstanding Slovenian examples of the urban community gardening – “Urban Furrows” in Maribor as a part of the European Capital of Culture 2012 and “Beyond a Construction Site” in Ljubljana as a part of the international performing arts festival Mladi levi (Young Lions) – are here interpreted in the context of urban culture and the concept of the “right to green”, a concept which has gained a lot of interest in contemporary theories of so-called “hands-on urbanism”. The chapter was published in a scientific monograph investigating the significance of culture and arts for a more balanced social and spacial development in cities.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3916635