Concepts, terminology, ideas

Conference organised by the Association of Theatre Critics and Researchers of Slovenia (DGKTS) in collaboration with Maribor Theatre Festival

Traditional theatre and contemporary performing arts belong to the more engaged forms of artistic expression as they always strive to comment the lived reality as precisely as possible regardless of the genre. Art is usually the first to pave the way to the yet conceptually unknown domains where traditional notions cannot be anymore of great help to theoretical reflection. It is therefore the aim of the conference to make an overview of the conceptual quagmires and terminological divergences against which contemporary Slovenian performing arts theory and practice are fighting today.
Performance activities are also well on their way into the second decade of the 21st century yet apparently without a proper theoretical basis and without being aware of the changes happening both on today’s practical (stage) and theoretical levels. Changes in performing practices as well as in thematic scopes raise doubts about the suitability of terms until recently devised both at home and abroad: are they still relevant? Did they perhaps acquire new meanings in the past decade or two or even became completely obsolete? How – if at all – can practitioners, critics, and theoreticians use them in their work?
The contributions at the conference will try to examine both the historical and the current state of affairs as well as the (con)texts of concepts, terms, and ideas in contemporary theatre and other performing practices and their usability in today’s social and artistic conditions. They will raise questions such as the current state of postdramatic theatre and performative studies, the relation between terms like theatricality and performativity, the directions of shift of contemporary performative practices, etc. It is certainly not to be expected that the results of the conference would bring about the unification of the Slovenian terminology of contemporary performance activities or establish guidelines for their further usage. Still we do hope that the presentation of different viewpoints and opinions will indicate the conceptual and terminological shifts as well as crucial directions of development in contemporary theatre.