The Analogue resists the Digital?
The Materiality of German Theatre and the Virtual World

‘Das Petroleum sträubt sich gegen die fünf Akte’: Brecht’s aphorism
expresses the twentieth-century theatre’s unease with nineteenth-century
forms and its search for alternatives: what kind of theatre could engage
with the experience and material reality of speed, technology, wealth,
industrial processes and emergent globalisation which petroleum, as reality
and as metaphor, encapsulates? 

But that was quite some time ago, before the internet, gene therapy, the
dotcom boom, and its bust. Has the pervasive experience of, indeed, the
reality of virtuality made Brecht’s profoundly innovative theatre itself
redundant and antiquated? Has the vast quantity and vast range of media
alternatives made theatre superfluous, or in some ways redefined its
potential? What implications does the technological, social and mental
environment of the twenty-first century have for the forms of theatre? Is
theatre adequate to the formal, or even the technical challenge of
representing the unrepresentable, rendering the invisible, virtual or absent
as palpable aesthetic experience?  The business of theatrical representation
has always dealt with an absent ‘real’, so is dramatic theatre, despite
premature reports of its death, once again well positioned for such a
challenge? Do postdramatic writing and practice offer approaches that
apprehend the elusiveness of the virtual? Is the incomprehensible of
twenty-first century experience in fact different to the sublime and
ineffable with which aesthetic practice has always engaged or which it has
sought to awaken in its recipients?

This conference seeks to interrogate the relationship between one of the
oldest art forms and a global society that generates obsolescence in ever
shorter periods of time. Our focus is the formal strategies with which
German-language writers for and practitioners in the theatre confront their
realities. We would welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers in either
English or German from researchers in the field of contemporary German
theatre. Graduate students are also invited to submit proposals for short
presentations in which they can share their current projects with the larger
academic community. Plans to publish the proceedings are currently underway.

The Conference will take place on the Blackrock Campus of University College
Dublin between Saturday 1 and Monday 3 September 2005.

300-word abstracts should be sent to [log in to unmask] by 28 February
2005.

David Barnett				Moray McGowan
Department of Drama			Department of Germanic Studies
University College Dublin		Trinity College Dublin