Finalized international projects

Title of project: International Scientific Conference on The Theatre of Local Histories in Central Europe
Duration: 1. 9. 2014 - 31. 1. 2015
Registration number: IVF 11420171
Co-ordinating organisation: The University of Silesia in Katovice (PL)
Project partners: Institute of Theatre and Film Research SAS (SK), Palacký University, Olomouc (CZ), Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute (HU)

Annotation: The contemporary theatres, especially the ones from smaller centres, become increasingly involved in the life of the local communities. In the performances they often bring up the subjects related to the history, as well as the cultural and ethnic identity of the place in which they operate. The theatre authors reflect upon the functioning of memory mechanisms and seeks to evoke the individual and collective experiences that were not taken into consideration in the widely available version of history. By raising the local and social political problems, the plays become part of the context with respect the place. They become a platform for the ethnic and national minorities, and also shed some focus on the ones excluded due to the economic reasons. The strategy of this theatre has been to become an increasingly popular medium for manifesting the local histories of a place, community and people.

Title of project: Screen Industries in East-Central Europe: An International Conference
Duration: 06.2014 - 05.2015
Registration number: IVF 21410342
Co-ordinating organisation: Czech Society for Film Studies (CZ)
Project partners: Institute of Theatre and Film Research SAS (SK); Balász Varga (HU); Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (PL)

Annotation: The 4th annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe (SIECE) conference will take advantage of the reputation built by the previous SIECE conferences in 2011, 2012 and 2013. They attracted dozens of scholars from European and American universities as well as prominent media practitioners to discuss key problems of screen industries in the region of Eastern and Central Europe. Each year, about 50 students from various universities attended the conference as an active audience, using the opportunity to broaden their knowledge about European film and television. Proceedings from all the conferences have been published in special English issues of the film studies journal Iluminace (www.iluminace.cz). Numerous reports about the conferences were published in English, Czech and Polish periodicles. Building on this tradition and international reputation, the 4th SIECE conference is again focusing on a highly relevant main topic, articulated in a widely distributed “call for papers” under the title “Industry of Prestige”. It refers to various ways how media companies, institutions, professional communities and cultures attach values to their products and activities. More specifically, the conference panels and discussions will look at issues such as film festivals and awards, film schools, state support programs and archival practices, consumer behavior, or industrial standard-setting initiatives, to analyze how symbolic values are attached to individual works, authors, genres, canons, national traditions, professions, etc. The topic is of high interest to both academia and practitioners in the time when differences between media content and media marketing, media production and media consumption gradually fade away.

Title of project: Opcje 2014/4: Popular Culture in Mid-Eastern Europe
Duration: 06.2014 – 11.2014
Registration number: IVF 11410168
Co-ordinating organisation: The Association for Publishing Initiatives, Katowice (PL)
Project partners: Lajos Palfavi (HU); Jan Přibil (CZ, Palacký University in Olomouc); Jan Blüml (CZ, Palacký University in Olomouc); László Milutinovits (HU); Jana Dudková (SK, Institute of Theatre and Film Research SAS); Elena Knopová (SK, Institute of Theatre and Film Research SAS); Juraj Maliček (SK), Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra

Annotation: The project will provide researchers and artists from V4 countries with a platform for presenting their views on popular culture by gathering their work in issue 4 of cultural quarterly Opcje. The idea of speccial issueu of Opcje tackling the problem of popular culture in Central Europe, was born from the presenting need to redefine the old dichotomy between „low“ and „hight“ cultural phenomena. For time, America had monopoly for producing „true“ art that also had entertaiment value. A comparative analysis of pop culture V4 countries will show that here, too, the border between them is now blurred. In the spirit of international Exchange of ideas, scholars will analyze and compare the nature and role of pop culture in various parts of the area. The final product will enter the public space both as a printed issue and a web publication, and will be further publicized and promoted internationally.

Title of project: Contemporary Central European Theatre: Documentary Versus
Postmemory
Duration: 1. 8. 2012 – 31. 7. 2013
Registration number: IVF 201210221
Co-ordinating organisation: International Alternative Culture Center, Budapest (HU)
Project partners: Institute of Theatre and Film Research SAS (SK; World and Theatre Civic Assiciation (CZ); Grzegorz HuberT (PL); Nadezda Lindovska (SK)

Annotation: Geopolitical changes in Europe that followed after 1989 have led to a situation in which the deconstruction of European and national identities has become a fact. The formation of a new cultural dimension of the united Europe – still under construction – was accompanied by the process of the revaluation of European history and especially the region. For the Visegrad countries, as for the post-communist countries in general, the last decade of the 20th century became the period when, along with revision of politics of memory, historical narratives that had dominated through the previous five decades were changed, sometimes to the diametrically opposite. In this situation theatre has been faced with a challenge: to draw public's attention to problems of the new 'black points' and prohibited zones that appeared through the creation of national myths, to the narratives about the past that had become marginalized, and to the memories that had been suppressed, altered, and/or deformed. The performances of the new generation of theatre artists seem to rebel against 'the correct memories' that the dominating version of history would suggest; they are extremely sensitive to the fact that in this part of Europe the transfer of memories from generation to generation was disrupted more than once and that these disruptions had to produce rather traumatic interpretations of the past. The contemporary artists are not only critical to the distortions and aberrations that collective memories often produce, thus contesting 'the objective truth'of history; for them, these memories are also reflections of historical traumas of the region and traces of numerous ideological manipulations.