Contemporary Art Culture as a Creator of Publicity New Forms: Experience of Perm Theatrical Community

This article covers some new forms of publicness in the field of art culture of the Russian city of Perm, e.g. dramatics as a performance in a street environment, and synthetic museum-theatrical form under the conditions of a stage box. The study was accomplished mainly via culturological method. At one time theatre left the urban environment, but in the 21st century theatrical forms have begun to permeate urban space again, the statement primarily concerns site-specific theatre. This is equivalent to the birth of new theatrical-city publicity, a new modality of the interpenetration of the public and the private. One of the best-known theatrical projects in this field is ‘Remote X’ (‘Rimini Protokoll’ band). Here, the close co-existence habitual to city dwellers turns into a social substrate, and a way to implement interpersonal artistic communication, thereby largely changing the disposition of the former, and transforming itself. Another new form of relationship between collective and individual aspects in the public sphere is the synthetic museum-theatre form, on the example of immersion dramatics ‘Permian Pantheon’ (Perm Academic Theatre, stager Dmitry Volkostrelov). The natural ‘calendar-seasonal’ tempo-rhythm of the dramatics creates a triple semantic effect risen from artistic reality. It immerses the viewer into the process of traditional subsistence in whole (actualisation of the cultural collective unconscious), represents cultural phenomena (which corresponds to the culture-focused paradigm of artistic consciousness of the second half of the 20th century to the early 21st century), reaches the level of worldview values, the philosophical generalisation of cultural-existential reality. Thus, on the example of two Perm theatrical plays the author can speak about the origin of new forms of publicness in contemporary culture to entail new relationships between publicity and privacy in the current realities.

Interpreting social issues: Museum theatre’s potential for critical engagement

Museum theatre and its potential within museum education is explored at the Museum Education and Research Laboratory at the University of Thessaly, Greece. There, the leading research project Museums and Education: methods of approaching and interpreting museum objects’aims to address how, over the last few decades, museum theatre has been in ever-increasing use to vocalize the sensitive issues of a multicultural society and marginalized social communities. Recent studies highlight museum theatre evoking empathy and critical engagement in the audience with the subject-matter of the performance. One such performance was organized by the School of Drama at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and studied in depth. Titled Voices of the City: Historical Routes through Theatre, the performance embodied controversial social issues, and its implementation was evaluated using qualitative methodology to examine the responses of visitors.