A series of events organised by Doris Kolesch and Kai Padberg, Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters".

This event will be streamed live.

To participate in the discussion, please register with Judith König (j.koenig2@fu-berlin.de) by 18 April 2021.

The fifth event of our series is an online talk with Nihad Kreševljaković and Hana Bajrović.
Moderation: Doris Kolesch & Senad Halilbašić

Nihad Kreševljaković is the director of the International Theatre Festival MESS and artistic director of the Memory Module programme, which were both held under special circumstances during the pandemic in 2020. Previously, he was the director of SARTR (Sarajevski Ratni Teatar), the Sarajevo War Theatre. With his focus on art practice under radical circumstances, he has been trying to find a connection between experiences of doing art under siege and during the pandemic.

Hana Bajrović graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo. Since 2015, she has been part of the production team of the MESS Festival. Some of her projects include "Women of the Besieged Sarajevo", an exhibition for which she also co-edited a book of the same name. She authored the book "Theater under Siege" and co-edited "Srebrenica – 25 Years Later”. Currently, she is researching and recording the activities of the Sarajevo theatre scene during the pandemic.

It was the middle of March 2020 when Germany went into lockdown. Back then, there had already been a curfew in Wuhan, China, for several weeks. In many other countries in Europe and worldwide, public life was abruptly shut down. The consequences for the cultural sector have been dire everywhere. All over the world, theatres have had to shut down unexpectedly and most remain closed. Schedules have been cancelled. Professional existences are endangered. At the same time, public and cultural life has shifted to the digital sphere. Many theatres and artists are using this way to stay in touch with their audiences and are exploring digital spaces more than ever before. But what forms of community-building are even remotely possible for theatre and the performing arts? What is the character of the relation between local institutions and these transnational spaces, which might open up and expand while national borders remain closed? What does it mean for artistic practice if humans assemble as a virtual audience while being physically alone in their respective homes? In what ways will the pandemic change theatre? What will digital assemblies mean for theatres after the pandemic?

In the series of events entitled "Temporal Communities and Digitality – Theatre During the Pandemic", theatre directors, theatre artists and scholars from around the world will report on the practical effects on theatre operations and their work. They will examine the various strategies with which stage and theatre creators have reacted to this situation, online and offline. Together with researchers from the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective", they will discuss how the global crisis of the theatre has created new temporal communities and to what extent these are created under the conditions of digitality.

This event is part of our series "Temporal Communities and Digitality - Theatre During the Pandemic".