Theatre Languages / Languages of the Stage: Marginality, Culture and Performance in Contemporary Europe
Gate Theatre Research Network (GTRN) Conference
Hosted by Drama and Theatre Studies, NUI Galway, Ireland
8-9 June, 2020
Call for papers
The conference of the GTRN seeks to contextualise the history and impact of Ireland’s Gate Theatre by exploring how theatre speaks differently to audiences across, and specific to, diverse cultures in contemporary Europe. The Gate Theatre saw itself as Ireland’s second national theatre, considering the fulfillment of its national remit to involve the staging of European plays and the practice of touring Irish work to mainland Europe. As such it functions as an exemplary case study of how theatre can speak to both the national and the international, to unity and diversity, to the mainstream and the marginal, especially in European contexts. This conference invites papers that will either directly address the history of the Gate or draw out potential comparative aspects from across Europe, perhaps with a view to developing broader collaborative research projects in the future.
Topics to be addressed during the 2020 conference in Galway include, but are not restricted to the following examples:
- How innovations in stagecraft (stage design, costumes, lighting, directing, acting) travel between countries, changing and refining national theatre practices.
- Reception of touring productions
- Adaptations and translations of canonical European plays in different countries
- European theatres that, like the Gate, have united national and transnational concerns as well as audiences
- European or global theatres that, like the Gate, have given space and voice to marginal identities.
- Migration of theatre artists and theatre practices in Europe.
- Languages of the stage and activism
- Minority languages and the theatre
In addition to roundtable discussions and presentations by GTNR directors, core members and advisory board members, scholars who are working on the Gate Theatre and/or comparable theatre companies or institutions across Europe are invited to submit a proposal for a 20-minute paper on any of the topics listed above. Please send your 300-word proposal and 150-word biography to gatetheatre@let.ru.nl by 1 March 2020. The GTNR board of directors will review all proposals and compile the expert meeting’s programme at their discretion.
The event will also feature the launch of an exhibition on the history of the Gate.
The Gate Theatre Research Network (GTRN) is a collaboration between scholars based in the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK, the Czech Republic, France, Norway, and the United States. Its purpose is to study the Dublin Gate Theatre in various international contexts by analysing its engagement with cosmopolitanism, cultural exchange and identity formation. The Gate Theatre Research Network is funded jointly by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Radboud University Nijmegen, the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Charles University, Prague