Forschendes Theater

Our subject is the growing field of performance-based investigation and its potential application in language acquisition and teaching. Taking the interrelations between artistic and scientific approaches as starting point, it will be investigated how a student-run theater project can find its place between these two specific cultures of research and invention. The project will also explore potential advantages for language teaching. The study will include a report about projects in Lithuania, the Russian Federation, and Serbia. The main section will present a big range of contemporary works of theater and performance collectives, as well as discuss the possible translation of these documented approaches into non- professional projects. Specific theatrical work will be considered in tandem with related forms of simulated fields of action, such as role play (LARP), reenactment, psychodrama, and theatrical installation. Great attention will be placed on procedures that tend to dissolve time and space notions, that is, ideas which push the limits of reality into the realm of possibility. The main emphasis will be on a transcultural perspective. The subject matter of this book will be the theater of in-between spaces, a theater of the third identity that advances the research on ambiguity and transformation.