IMC Leeds, July 1st–4th, 2019 (just before SITM at Genova, July 8th–13th)
Materiality has been an emerging topic of cultural studies in recent decades. It has always been playing a crucial role in theatre studies. Images, documentation or even archaeological findings of pageants wagons and stage machines, stage decorations, props, puppets, costumes, musical instruments used for the performances, etc. enable us to partly reconstruct how the plays were staged. They might even serve as testimonies that there were any plays at all. On the other hand, our understanding of plays that have come down to us deeply depends on our reconstruction of their material side. Finally, medieval theatre studies have always been analysing the materials side of play manuscripts that might document the use of the text during or in preparation of a performance and might show corrections, additions or re-writings of play texts, adapting them to further performances under changed circumstances.
In addition, many medieval religious play texts focus certain objects, such as reliquaries, the cross, the holy sepulchre, or the host, discussing the relationship between materiality and spirituality, while carnival plays and farces might focus on very different “things”, which could be present on stage or just imagined (like the violet replaced by scat in Neidhart plays). These “things” might well be understood as “agents” in the sense of modern cultural studies, even if we just look at the texts. The power of the “agent” must be imagined even stronger in the context of a performance, especially (again, in religious plays) when these “things” were real sacred objects, and not just props.
The special topic of the IMC Leeds 2019 thus should invite us to reflect the value that materiality has for theatre history, and to discuss our methods of reconstructing both the material and the performative side of plays, depending on each other.
You are certainly welcome to organize your own sessions (3 papers from different universities) at Leeds. Complete sessions have to be proposed via the IMC homepage by end September, 2018. For all those of you, however, who would like to offer an individual paper about materiality in medieval theatre, I am happy to organize one or several sessions. Please send me (cora.dietl@germanistik.uni-giessen.de) your title and a short proposal (100-150 words) for a paper (20min) in English, French or German by September 15, 2018. This will allow me some time to fill possible gaps.
