Theater/performance cannot be considered as a separate subject – neither can their history be described as a closed, homogeneous line of development. They rather intertwine and combine with other forms of media and aesthetic representation, ›borrowing‹ techniques, dramaturgies, materials and processes. It is precisely this interconnectedness that defines theater/performance’s »Sitz im Leben«: Its cultural meaning and social position is indicative of the specific historical circumstances. These determine the possibilities and scope granted to theatre and performance.
The concept of Critical Media History (Davis/Marx 2021) places these dynamic structures at the center of its consideration and consistently asks about the processes of formation and transformation of what is considered theater or performance. This history is not one of successive ›great works‹, but an analysis of contingent constellations in which larger social and cultural phenomena become visible in the prism of media and aesthetic processes.
These formative processes can be described in the tension between perception (aisthesis), understood as a culturally formed form of reception, apparatus or materiality and the inscribed practices. They do not form teleological lines or the unfolding of an ›essence‹ (»the theater«, »the film«, etc.), but as a constellation in which temporal shifts, anachronisms, cultural imports, etc. become describable.
Critical Media History defines itself as a cultural studies approach based on a perspective of »connected history« (Subrahmanyam): the question of how connections and the possibility of interaction are established is one of the guiding categories of this model.
In December 2023, Early Modern Media Ecology (Cambridge UP) was published, a long essay in which Peter W. Marx discusses the model in more detail using the example of the early modern period.
Literatur
Davis, Tracy C. 2021. "Setasidedness." In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography., edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, 118-140. London/New York: Routledge.
Davis, Tracy C., and Peter W. Marx. 2021. "On Critical Media History." In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography., edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, 1-39. London/New York: Routledge.
Johnson, Odai. 2021. "The Size of All that’s Missing." In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography., edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, 43-64. London/New York: Routledge.
Marx, Peter W. 2021. "‚Turtles all the way down.‘ Zu methodischen Fragen der Theaterhistoriographie." Forum Modernes Theater 32 (2):5-22.
Marx, Peter W. 2021. "On Circulation and Recycling." In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography., edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, 327-347. London/New York: Routledge.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. "Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia." Modern Asian Studies 31 (3):735-762.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2019. Empires between Islam & Christianity, 1500-1800. Albany: State University of New York.
