Cultural Mobility, Networks, and Theatre

The Budapest premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s Kísértetek (Gengangere) was on 17 October 1908 by the Thália Társaság, a Hungarian independent theatre. Though banned earlier, by 1908, Ibsen’s text had already been played all over Europe. Between 1880 and 1908, the search of IbsenStage indicates 402 records, but probably the actual performance number was higher. The popularity of the text can be seen in the fact that all the independent theatres staged it, and most of the famous and less famous travelling companies and travelling stars also kept it in their repertoires. Though, usually, the high-artistic independent and the commercial international and regional travelling companies are treated separately, here, I argue for their close real and/or virtual interconnections, creating such a theatrical and cultural network, in which the local, the regional, the national, and the transnational interacted with and were influenced by each other. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such interaction among different forces and agents on different levels was one of the special features of cultural mobility (Greenblatt) which characterized intercultural theatre culture, existing in Europe and America, and extending its influence almost all over the globe.

Theatrical Exchanges across the Baltic Sea in the 1930s

This article explores theatrical exchanges across the Baltic Sea in the 1930s as part of the cultural diplomacy of recently independent Finland. The Finnish National Theatre visited the Estonia Theatre in Tallinn in 1931 and in 1937, and the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1936. These theatre visits were different in terms of the visiting production. In Stockholm in 1936, and in Tallinn in 1937, the Finnish National Theatre showcased its work, while during the bilateral exchange with the Estonia Theatre in 1931, the main actors of two of the productions visited the other theatre and the audiences saw two hybrid performances of the two productions. Therefore, the visits are discussed in terms of international and transnational exchange.

Performing Nordic White Femininity

This study is an intersectional investigation of how the first two international Swedish superstars, Jenny Lind (1820–1887) and Christina Nilsson (1843–1921), performed gender, race, nationalism, and class during their respective tours of the United States of America in 1850–1852 and 1870–1872. The purpose is to chart early transatlantic performances of Nordic white femininity and Swedishness as well as to discuss the symbolical values and associations that it signaled. I will argue that Lind and Nilsson set out a template of idealized Nordic white femininity in the U.S. and that they contributed to the growing identity and self-awareness of Swedish-Americans.

Inside Frozen Geographies

After the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by the Russian Federation in 2014, the attitude of Baltic theatre producers and artists towards cultural and institutional partnerships with Russian theatres and their involvement in the mutual artistic exchanges, tours, common projects, and networking changed; not only due to these exchanges becoming a controversial issue in the public eye, but also due to the polarization they caused in the artistic community itself. Some artists, like Latvian stage director Alvis Hermanis, have decisively terminated all their previous creative partnerships, arrangements and tours, calling also other theatre artists “to take sides”. Others, like Russian stage and film director Kirill Serebrennikov who, for years, had been involved with Baltic theatres, would regard taking sides as a disastrous yielding of culture to the logic of war – theatre should be kept as the last link between societies gradually separated by reciprocal propaganda insanity. Building upon these conflicts describing the changes in intercultural theatrical cooperation between Russian and Baltic theatres, the article focuses on the analysis of three productions: Dreams of Rainis by Kirill Serebrennikov at the Latvian National Theatre (2015), Alexander Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov directed by Eimuntas Nekrošius at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre (2015) and Brodsky/Baryshnikov staged by Alvis Hermanis at the New Riga Theatre in 2016. All of the performances refused to stay inside the frameworks marked for them by the regimes of propaganda wars, public diplomacy, or dispositif of security, but focused instead on the possibilities of intellectual disobedience.

Constructing Finno-Ugric Identity through Theatre

The article investigates the construction of transnational Finno-Ugric identity through the theatre festival Mayatul and different performative strategies. This kind of identity construction is investigated through the framework of identity politics and transnationalism. The definition of the Finno-Ugric peoples (Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, Samis, Mordvins, Komi, Udmurts and others) is based foremost on their language kinship. It is believed that similar characteristics of languages and a similar natural environment and climate have shaped the close-to-nature lifestyle and the particular perception of the world shared by the Finno-Ugric peoples.Essential platforms for constructing transnational Finno-Ugric identity are different theatre festivals, among which Mayatul (since 1992) is the most prominent. The majority of productions at the festival are performed in Finno-Ugric languages and interpret the literary texts or folklore of these peoples. However, only a few productions strive for indigenous aesthetics like those of Estonian theatre director Anne Türnpu. The Finno-Ugric peoples’ identity is predominantly a minority identity because mostly they represent a small national and language group in a bigger state like Russia, and only Finland and Hungary have enjoyed one hundred years of independence. Nevertheless, all countries and nations embrace smaller ethnic or cultural minorities, thus minority identity is a universal concept. Theatre festivals are able to unite minority identities into larger transnational identites, even when it is just an imagined community.

The Travelling of Dramatic Texts and Memory Patterns

The article discusses Estonian memory theatre in the 1970s–90s and at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the framework of transnational/transcultural influences. Dwelling on Jeanette R. Malkin’s definition of memory theatre as a theatre that both imitates the flow of memories and initiates the process of remembrance, and relying on the concepts of transnational and transcultural memory, I analyze the dramatic texts of Estonian playwrights Rein Saluri and Madis Kõiv, likewise the works of female stage director Merle Karusoo. I focus on the phenomenon of travelling memory, introduced by scholar of literature and culture, Astrid Erll, and engage a comparative approach to the texts and stage interpretations. Through the media of texts and mnemonic forms in motion and on the basis of particular case studies, I examine how stories/narratives, memory patterns, and mnemonic practices have crossed cultural borderlines and been performed on different (Estonian, Finnish, Estonian-Russian, Austrian) stages, and how they have primarily launched hidden or blurred memories.

Russian Relations

This article explores the unlikely collaboration between a Swedish art and dance historian, a Russian amateur historian, and a Russian-Swedish doctoral student to seek out the early career of migrating dancer Anna Robenne (one of her names). The article looks into the activist ways in which the explorers interacted with Russian, Swedish, and Finnish archives in order to both reveal and make accessible cross-border materials and knowledge pertaining to Robenne. To explore the relationship between the Robenne materials, the archival institutions, and the group of collaborating historians, the authors draw on Caswell and Cifor’s notion of “radical empathy”. The article thus brings new archival theory into the performing arts domain and makes a dance contribution to the broader field of critical archival and heritage studies. To cross borders to account for Robenne’s Russian legacy counters previous historiography’s disinterest in following the careers of non-canonized migrating artists in the Nordic-Baltic region.

National Trauma on a Foreign Stage

This article surveys the performance of the play Departure (Lähtö in Finnish, Minek in Estonian) by Estonian Rein Saluri at the Finnish National Theatre in 1988 during the last few years of the Cold War. The play depicts the deportation of an Estonian family to Siberia in the fall of 1946. The Finnish National Theatre invited Estonian Mati Unt to act as the director. The actors were Finnish, as were the audience, apart from a few individual spectators and during a short visit when Departure was performed in Estonia. The aim is to analyze how a theatre performance connected with an aspect of Estonian traumatic history and national memory was understood and felt by a country with a different historical and contemporary background. The performances of Departure show the ways in which repetition, memory, and re-appearance work and function in the theatre. Departure as theatre had power over history in its ability to reshape the image of the past through physical presence and affection. It increased in Finland the knowledge of and empathy toward Estonia and the presence of Estonian culture before the great political upheavals. However, the Finnish audience constructed the meanings of the play without the interaction between the collective memory, that is, the Finnish “memory” was historical and theatrical. Concerning national collective memory, it was not possible to cross the border.

Theatre Against Stagnation

This article explores theatrical exchanges across the Baltic Sea in the 1930s as part of the cultural diplomacy of recently independent Finland. The Finnish National Theatre visited the Estonia Theatre in Tallinn in 1931 and in 1937, and the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1936. These theatre visits were different in terms of the visiting production. In Stockholm in 1936, and in Tallinn in 1937, the Finnish National Theatre showcased its work, while during the bilateral exchange with the Estonia Theatre in 1931, the main actors of two of the productions visited the other theatre and the audiences saw two hybrid performances of the two productions. Therefore, the visits are discussed in terms of international and transnational exchange.