Welcome to Performing Premodernity!

We celebrate our ten-year anniversary in 2023 with the publication of an anthology, edited by Magnus Tessing Schneider and Meike Wagner:

Performing the Eighteenth Century: Theatrical Discourses, Practices, and Artefacts

What can artists learn from theatre scholars when it comes to performing historical works on stage today? What can theatre scholars learn from today’s artists when it comes to understanding the works and practices of the past? How is the experience of modern spectators affected by attending performances in historic theatres? And how, aesthetically, do we experience the reconstruction of productions from the remote past?

To read more, and for information about how to purchase or download the anthology, click HERE.

New research report and article:

Theatre historian Petra Dotlačilová and costume maker Anna Kjellsdotter look back at the process of experimental costume recreation for the historically informed performance of Le Devin de village (The Village Soothsayer) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau from 1752/3, put on by Performing Premodernity at the Ulrikdals Palace Theatre Confidencen.
Read their research report HERE.

To learn more about the methodology of historically informed costume, developed by Petra Dotlačilová and Anna Kjellsdotter during their collaboration within Performing Premodernity.
Read their recent article published in Studies in Costume and Performance HERE.

Performing Premodernity began in 2013 as a five-year research project based at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, and as one of eight Premodernity projects funded by Riksbankens jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences). Concentrating on repertoire from the second half of the eighteenth century and through both academic and artistic research the project aims to contribute to the revitalizing of historically informed performance today. The aims of the project, couched in terms of a developing manifesto can be read HERE.

Photo: Rousseau’s Pygmalion, Český Krumlov, 15 June 2015. João Luís Paixão (Pygmalion), Laila Cathleen Neuman (Galathée).

Click HERE to watch David Wiles’ IFTR keynote address (see p. 263 of the anthology), a video essay, and performances of Performing Premodernity’s production of Pygmalion.