"Metropolitan Theatrics" charts the unsettling and reshaping of everyday life in
Weimar Berlin between 1919 and 1933. It does so, by convening a conversation between the
multidisciplinary insights of performance studies and recent geographical approaches to the
study of the modern city. Berlin's restless relationship with the 'modern' offers, it is argued,
an ideal historical milieu in which to test performance theory while at the same time question
some of its presentist assumptions. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, the study
focuses on the role of performance - not only theatrical representation, but also the popular
press, novels, the visual and performing arts, modern dance, scientific experiments, and
everyday practices - in order to demonstrate the specific conjunction of visuality and
embodiment that allied 'Berlin' with 'modernity.'
The thesis is divided into two main parts. Part One is a close reading of texts and images
and how they have come to figure Weimar Berlin as an imagined environment. In this
respect, recent scholarship in the humanities has been caught on the horns of a theoretical
dilemma, namely how to accommodate the seemingly undocumentable event of
performance. Different responses to this dilemma are discussed. In particular, it is argued
that in seeking to go beyond representation to embodied experience, a sense of the cultural
presence of the former in the latter merits greater critical attention. Part Two continues the
thesis's discussion of performance's unorthodox archives by drawing attention to a
repertoire of aesthetic and scientific practices which were developed to sense and adapt to
the traumatic shock of metropolitan modernity. Ultimately, this thesis provides an
historically specific account of aspects of Weimar modernity and thus means to contribute
not only to an historical geography of Berlin, but also to the forging of methodologies that
serve to widen the cross-disciplinary study of modern culture and modernity. Given the
importance of the Weimar era to our understanding of the nature of European modernity, the
development of a geography of performance makes a strong case for re-examining the ways
in which the relationship between 'modernity' and the 'city' is usually formulated / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/16967 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Vasudevan, Alexander Patrick |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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